The St.

Johns Review
Volume XLVI, number two (2002)

Acting Editor George Russell Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann James Carey Beate Ruhm von Oppen Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Blakely Phillips
The St. Johns Review is published by the Ofce of the Dean, St. Johns College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. Johns College, P .O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. Johns College Bookstore. 2002 St. Johns College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720
Publishing and Printing

THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW

Contents
Essays and Lectures
Measure, Moderation and the Mean............................................ 5

Joe Sachs
Plato and the Measure of the Incommensurable Part II. The Mathematical Meaning of the Indeterminite Dyad................................................................................ ................... 25

A.P. David
Moral Reform in Measure for Measure............................................63

Laurence Berns

Book Reviews
Eva Branns, The Ways of Naysaying ................................................79

Chaninah Maschler
Eva Branns What, Then, is Time?.....................................................107

Torrance Kirby
The Feasting of Socrates Peter Kalkavages translation of Timaeus...................................117 Eva Brann

THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW

Measure, Moderation, and the Mean

Joe Sachs
(with particular reference to the story Odysseus tells in the Odyssey)
Anyone who comes to love the writings and artworks that have survived from ancient Greece ought one day to visit Olympia. In Athens there are wonderful things to see, but also evidence everywhere of the destructive effects on buildings and statues of some of the most polluted air anywhere in the world. But, in Olympia, in the Peloponnese, where the most famous of the ancient athletic games were celebrated, one can still breathe purer air, and see glorious sights. In particular, in the museum there, at the two ends of the large main room, restored to their complete shapes, are the two pediments of a temple of Zeus built in the decade of the 460s BC. (Illustrations are at the end of the text.) The form of a pediment will be familiar to you as what sits above the appropriate sort of entrance to a temple. Picture a rectangle, wider than it is long, made of evenly spaced vertical columns; resting on top of this row of columns is a triangle, shorter than it is wide, with a series of sculpted gures across it. The statue at the center of the triangular pediment is the tallest gure and the focus of the whole composition. The eastern pediment at Olympia depicts Zeus at its center, in a monumental style that makes one think of Egypt. In fantasy, one might see this pediment as a doorway into ancient Greece, leading in from the east. But the truer doorway to things that are most characteristic of classical Greece is at the other end of the room. The western pediment depicts the defeat of the Centaurs, who are men in their heads, arms, and upright chests, but horses in their legs and horizontal lower trunks. They are attempting to carry off human

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women, and one young boy, but the sculptor has captured the moment of their defeat. They are being fought by human heroes, including Theseus, but they are defeated by a look and a gesture. At the center of the pediment is Apollo, ten feet tall, looking to his right with his right arm outstretched, the hand level, the palm downward. The look in his eyes is not angry but serious, and his face is not clenched in threat but calm. The centaurs cannot have their way when faced with the power radiated by such dignity. This scene, displaying in outward gures an inner topography of the human soul, holds in it something of the spirit of classical Greece. The fact that you or I can see these seemingly invisible qualities, just by being patient and receptive in front of some shaped blocks of stone, is one of the amazing achievements that has survived from that time and place. Zeus was, as you know, the father and ruler of the Olympian gods, and even the name of the town Olympia was taken from its temple of Zeus, who was the Olympian, but somehow Apollo came to be pre-eminent among the gods imagined as living on Olympus. At Delphi, on Mount Parnassus, above the Gulf of Corinth, there was an ancient temple of Gaia, Mother Earth, which was considered the center of the earth. But people were kept away from it by the Python, an inhuman monster, until Apollo killed it. The Pythia, the priestess of the temple, then became a medium through whom people could consult Apollo, and learn his word, or oracle. The story of Pythian Apollo embodies the same meaning as that of the Apollo sculpted at Olympia, a victory on behalf of humanity, won over older and subhuman enemies. The dragons and half-humans are not wiped out, but become subject to something shining and beautiful. I think you will nd some version of this insight present in almost every work you read from classical Greece, though not everyone would agree, and it may certainly at times be something hard won and dimly seen. But even tragedy, a type of poetry discovered by certain Greeks, always displays that, even in the most horrendous circumstances, there is a human dignity that we can still

recognize; that when it is recognized it commands respect; and that this respect allows all things to be seen in their true proportions. Above the doorway of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, we are told (Plato, Protagoras 343B) that two sayings were inscribed: Know thyself, and Nothing to excess. These may seem to be disconnectedan exhortation to self-knowledge and a platitude about not going overboard with anythingbut to think them together is to nd the meaning of each. Know thyself means know your true limits, the greed and ambition to which no human being should aspire and the depths to which no human being should sink. And Nothing to excess is not just practical advice; it means that the nature of anything, including human life, is revealed only when its true proportions are foundthat the truth of anything is its form. The positive version of Nothing to excess is another saying Measure is bestand the measure of a thing is its form. To take a simple example, what are the right proportions for the entrance to a temple? When I described the pediments at Olympia and asked you to picture them and the columns under them, Ill bet you got their proportions just about right. The rectangle formed by the columns is wider than it is high. How much wider? Enough so that it will not look squashed together, but not so much that it would become stringy looking. Let your imagination squeeze and stretch it to see what goes wrong, and then notice that to get it right again you have to bring it back to a certain very denite shape. This is the golden rectangle. It has been produced spontaneously by artists, architects, and carpenters of any and every time and place. What is the ratio of its width to its height? I can tell you exactly what it is, but not in numbers. I can also tell it to you in numbers, but not exactly. It is approximately 61.8 units wide and 38.2 units high. That will get you in the ballpark and your eye will then adjust it to make the ratio exact, but it can be proven that no pair of numbers, to any nite precision, can accurately express this ratio, which is that formed by cutting a line so that the whole has to its larger part the same ratio that the larger part has to the smaller. If you have a calculator, you can check that 61.8 is to 38.2 in just

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about the same ratio as that of 100 to 61.8, but no matter how many decimal places you take it to, any ratio of numbers for the parts will fail to match that of the whole to the larger part. We know many things by measuring, and our usual way of measuring is with numbers, but in this case numbers are too crude an instrument by which to know something our eyes know at a glance. Taking the measure of something, then, does not necessarily require quantifying it. We are always going too far in trying to quantify things. The intelligence quotient is a precise number, and no doubt it means something, but it doesnt capture anything worth calling intelligence. An acquaintance of mine, who grew up in Baltimore, once watched an old, uneducated cook in North Carolina make biscuits. She was writing down the recipe, and at one point asked How much shortening did you use? The reply was Enough to make it short. This example reveals both the genuine intelligence of the cook, which would not show up on any test score, and the fact that she was measuring the shortening not by its volume or weight but by its feel as she mixed it into the dough. Her hands were performing a qualitative measurement, just as the eyes of your imagination were measuring the rectangle by its shape, rather than by the lengths of its sides. You should not be too quick to agree with me about this, because if you do, you may have to give up many other things you believe. I am claiming, and this is something I learned from certain dead Greeks, that the world really has qualities in it, that they are not subjective distortions projected onto it, but the true forms of things. I know them by my senses, and I know them better that way than by any theoretical explanations of them. With the golden rectangle, the discovery of the ratio of its sides reveals something that we can never name directlywe cannot say how many times bigger one side is than the other, or than any possible fractional part of the otherbut we can still recognize that ratio in two ways: in its sameness with another ratio, or, even more simply, in the distinctively shaped rectangle it produces. What is quantitatively incommensurable is qualitatively harmonious. Similarly, the experienced cook

knows that all batches of our and shortening are not identical, and that they may not behave the same way at different times of the year. If you want the biscuits to turn out right, the only thing to trust is your hands. We need not go through all ve senses, but one example of measurement by the ear will be helpful. Clamp a guitar string at both ends, put a bridge under it about two-fths of the way from either end, and pluck the two parts. You will hear something interesting. But what if the string is not of uniform thickness all the way along? If you have measured the two lengths to make them exactly as two to three, you might still hear something that sounds wrong, just a little off. The interval of a fth is produced by strings with lengths in a perfectly commensurable ratio, all other things being equal, but the lack of uniformity in real strings means that one tunes an instrument best with ones ear. It is true that musicians nowadays sometimes use little electronic devices that read out frequencies of vibration. But if the machine malfunctions, it will do no good for the musician to tell the audience he got all the numbers right. Only for the ear is there such a thing as being in tune. Measure, proportion, and harmony are in the nature of things, and we have a direct responsiveness to them that orients us in the world. These are not the ratios of mathematics, but incarnate ratios. And the words pure and applied do not t the distinction, because the purer instances of measure are the ones given to our senses. A tradition preserved by a twelfth century writer (Johannes Tzetzes) tells us that the inscription above the doorway of Platos school, the Academy, read Let no one without geometry enter under my roof. Does this mean that skill in mathematics was, as we would say, a prerequisite for his classes? I dont think so. It seems to me important that the entrant is not required to have mathematics, but geometry. Much of mathematics develops from the act of counting, a fundamental and natural power without which we could not speak or think, but geometry starts in a different way, from a sensory recognition of the ordering of simple visible shapes. In Platos Gorgias (508a), Socrates actually tells a young man that he is without geom-

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etry, but he is not criticizing Callicles for his intelligence or learning or skill, but blaming him for a failure of moral choice. The young man is greedy and in danger of having no friends, Socrates says, because he does not recognize the way geometrical equality gives all things the proportions that let them be part of larger wholes. The loss of a sense for geometry is equated with losing ones way in the human world. An example that shows both the positive and the negative side of this is the central scene in Platos Meno. Menos boy, a slave who has never been taught geometry, begins to discover it in front of us. Relying at rst solely on his ability to count, he twice goes wrong in trying to measure the side of the double square, but counting also shows him he is wrong. With Socrates leading the way, by drawing gures and pointing at them, the slave eventually is led to trust his eyes, and to see the square double itself, out of itself. And while Socrates asks all the questions, the slave has to do all the seeing himself, out of himself, just as he was led to his mistakes, but made them himself. This is all very elementary, but the slave has geometry in him, and he also has a little bit of courage and determination in getting it outtwo qualities his master lacked when he found some unexpected difculty in answering other questions. And this nally is the point of the scene, the reason Socrates arranges it in front of us: Meno cannot see that his boy is a better man than he is. We can all recognize that certain people deserve more respect than others, if we are honest, but Meno has lost that capacity. He has lost his way. He is without geometry. This way of understanding geometry may help explain an apparent inconsistency in Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics. Near its beginning, Aristotle says something that might at rst seem to be opposite to the inscription on Platos gates. He warns the reader not to look for the precision of mathematical demonstration in the study of ethics (1194b 19-27). Is this not equivalent to writing on the portals of this sort of philosophy, let no one try to enter here with geometry? If so, it is odd that Aristotle lls his exploration of ethics from the beginning with references to actions that are in pro-

portion, or in ratio, or in a right ratio. For instance, someone may have good fortune and a steady course through life, but be knocked out of equilibrium by some misfortune. The inability to cope with disaster is out of proportion (1100a 23, 1101a 17) with the rest of the life. Since some alteration is inevitable, and some grief would be appropriate, and no rules prescribe its amount or how it should be expressed, only a geometrical eye can judge this. The tness of such actions might be measured with some precision, but it can never be demonstrated. All the circumstances and all the history of any action can never be known, too many considerations have to be balanced, and equally good alternative ways of handling difculties are always possible. Aristotle, then, does believe that human actions can be chosen and recognized as right or wrong with precision, but he denies that this is the same as the precision of a mathematical demonstration. But he not only uses the language of ratio and proportion for the kind of precision appropriate to ethics, he also speaks of all actions that come from virtues of character as actions that hit the mean. This is easy to misunderstand, because readers tend to ignore the warning he gives almost as soon as he begins talking about the mean, that this sort of mean is also an extreme (1107a 6-8, 22-3). In fact, people rarely understand that this sort of mean is not quantitative at all. But taking it in a quantitative sense opens the way to identifying the mean with the mediocre, the middle of the road, or even middle-class morality, the sort of timidity that shies away from anything that might distinguish one from the crowd. But one of the things that Aristotle says hits the mean is courage, and he says plainly that there is no such thing as too much courage. Now one way to see how courage both is and is not a mean condition is to extend the mathematical language to a second dimension, and this is both accurate and helpful. There is no such thing as too much courage, but there is such a thing as too much condence, just as there can be too little of it. Courage occupies a mean position on a scale of fearfulness and fearlessness. The sense in which courage is an extreme is on a different axis, one on which

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the person who has just the right amount of fear puts that attitude into action in the most excellent way. We might even liken this twodimensional scheme to the appearance of the west pediment at Olympia, on which Apollo occupies the middle position, but also towers over everyone else. Courage is like that. As I say, this is true and it helps one keep hold of Aristotles claim that the virtues are extremes of human character, but also stand in and aim at a mean. But for all that, this talk of measuring along two axes seems to me to be misleading in the most important respect. I can show how very simply. Just ask yourself if the power of Apollo over Centaurs and humans would be greater if he were taller. As it is, he towers over them, but the design could have been made in such a way that he dwarfed them, reduced them to puny insignicance. With a little bit of play in the imagination, I think you can see that this would destroy the sculptures effect. The designer of the pediment (who may have been someone named Alkamenes) wasnt aiming at making Apollo as big as possible, but at making him extend the human stature just a little. The Centaurs are sub-human monsters; a gigantic Apollo would also be monstrous. The sculptor has not only placed Apollo in the middle of the horizontal array; he has also hit a mean along the vertical axis. All the power of the ensemble depends on getting the gures in a right relation to one another. As with the golden rectangle (and recall that the pediment originally sat on top of one), it is not a matter simply of adjusting Apollos height, but of forming a single design. Apollos height is a precise mean between a ridiculous shortness and a monstrous tallness, but that mean is also an extreme in the sense that it is unsurpassably right. But the way in which it is unsurpassably right is not quantitative. It is unsurpassably right in the design to which it belongs. It ts, and nothing else would. Liddell and Scott, the authors of the standard dictionary of ancient Greek, will tell you that aret, the word for virtue, comes from the name of Ares, the god of war, but another school of thought derives it from a humble verb that means to t together (arariskein), or be ttingit may be related to a similar humble verb, from wood-

working (harmozein), from which we get our word harmony. Courage too, as Aristotle or any thoughtful person would explain it, comes not from the bloodthirstiness of the war god, but from recognizing what ones circumstances call for and carrying it into action. Only when the circumstances are extreme, as they are for Patroclus or Hector, does courage call for the extreme risk, or sacrice, of life, or perhaps, in the case of Achilles, for the sacrice of revenge. At the end of the Iliad, the usual ways of confronting an enemy are no longer tting, and Achilles recognizes that. The recognition that Hectors body belongs to his father and to his city has nothing to do with anything quantitative. It is not arrived at by adjusting any sort of dial up from too little or down from too much. But it is a measured response to the situation that Achilles faces. It is geometrical equality that Achilles restores, by letting the dead man be given an appropriate funeral. It is dignity that he measures. Priam, the miserable wreck of an old man at Achilless feet, dominates his action in exactly the way Apollo dominates the Centaurs. In both cases, anger takes up a subordinate position in the design of the human soul. It nds its right proportion to the whole. On a list of the various meanings of the word logos preserved from Aristotles school by an ancient scholar (Theon of Smyrna), one of those meanings was the ratio of one who gives respect to the one who is respected. By looking at Apollo in his glory, or at Priam in his misery, we can begin to take our own measure. This kind of qualitative measurement is appropriately represented by ratios, because a ratio is not a quantity. A ratio limits a quantity. It is a revealing fact that we all have trouble remembering what Euclid means by greater ratiothat it is not the span of the interval between two magnitudes but the size of the rst in relation to the second that he is referring to. A length, or an area, or a volume, or for that matter a weight is measured by its size or amount, but a ratio is something on a different order of things. We measure length by cutting it up and counting the pieces, but ratios do not admit that kind of treatment. Fractions do. Fractions are quantities but ratios are not. The nature of quantity is that of material. There

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can always be more of it or less, arranged this way or that. And this way of looking at quantity helps one see that ratios belong to the realm not of material but of form. In the Odyssey, Odysseus tells a story that goes on for four long books. About two-thirds of the way through it he tries to stop and go to bed, but his hosts will not let him. He claims the story is taking too long to tell, and there is too much more of it, but they are spellbound and persuade him to go on. The king who speaks for them tells Odysseus that there is a morph upon his words (XI, 367), meaning a shapeliness or gracefulness. This is one of the words that comes later to be used for form in an important philosophic sense. Odysseus need not measure his words by time or number, the king is telling him, because his hearers measure them by beauty and depth. A form does not merely surround its content with a shape. It transforms the material and makes it be what it is, through and through. And just as Alkinous praises Odysseus for the form of his story, Aristotle too, in his Poetics (Chap. 8, 1451a), praises Homer for knowing where to start and end an epic poem to make it be one story goverened by one action. What is the form that governs the story Odysseus tells the Phaiakians? Neither they nor we ever take that story to be a simple report of the events that Odysseus witnessed and took part in since the time he left Troy. It is a story formed or transformed by art. But if all stories that reshape events were lies, ction would simply mean falsehood. Alkinous distinguishes Odysseus from the multitude of liars the dark earth breeds. His criterion is not easy to translate, but it is understandable to us because we too have heard Odysseus tell his story, and know exactly what he means. Lattimore makes Alkinous say that the liars make up stories from which no one could learn anything (XI, 366). The more usual translation has it that the lying stories are made up out of things no one could see, and this, in turn, either in the sense that all the human witnesses are dead, or in a deeper sense. Both translations are possible, and both capture something of what Alkinous is talking about. Odysseus is trying to get something out of the Phaiakians, but he is also letting them learn

from his experience, and they count that a fair exchange. Things that are literally false, contrary to fact, are redeemed from falsehood if they capture truth that goes beyond the merely factual. No one can go see if the story was accurate, but no sensible person would try to check it in that way, because its proper subject is something that cannot be seen. The story puts in front of the eyes of our imaginations things that are invisible. What is Odysseuss story about? It is, rst of all, full of fabulous beings, gods and monsters and people who live in strange ways. A question that is repeatedly asked, not with formulaic phrasing but with constant changes in its wording, is whether the characters that are about to be encountered are human, that is, dwelling on the earth and eaters of bread (VI, 8; IX, 89, 191). And even among those who are not immortal gods and monsters, some dwell under the earth and drink blood, some dwell in mountain caves and are cannibals, and some eat the lotus fruit and dwell in their own psyches. But these non-humans are not only a background against which the human form is displayed, they are constant temptations to the humans themselves. Some of the companions of Odysseus are seduced by the lotus into the oblivion of ignorance, but Odysseus himself is later seduced by the Sirens, toward the oblivion produced by the love of knowledge. On either side there is a loss of connectedness to the human community. And Odysseuss story begins among the Kikones, where his men get drunk and reckless with success, and then, when their luck turns, lose six of their companions out of each of their twelve ships; his story ends among the cattle of Helios, where the men who are left, less than fty of them on their one remaining ship, get hungry and reckless in misfortune, and lose their lives. In both overcondence and despair their hungers become unmeasured by judgement. And again Odysseus too experiences the same dangers, in his different way. His hunger for recognition, when he has saved himself and his men from the Cyclops, results in a foolhardy judgement which brings him Poseidons curse, and turns victory into needless defeat; and this is followed by another foolhardy judgement, that he

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could stay awake for ten straight days with the bag of winds, and arrive home the single-handed savior of his men. His hunger for glory is as deadly to his judgement as his companions hungers are to theirs. This break-down of judgement is again a loss of the connectedness of human community, since disproportionate hunger of any kind, whether from extreme self-indulgence or extreme need, brings isolation. After the asco with the bag of winds, Odysseus twice shows himself to us in isolation on top of mountains (X, 97 and 148), and this image surrounds his explicit comparison of a monstrous Laistrygonian to a mountain peak (X, 113), and echoes his earlier description of the Cyclops (IX, 187-92). Here is what Odysseus says when he narrates his rst sight of the cave of Polyphemus: Here a monster of a man bedded down, who now was herding his ocks alone and afar, for he did not mingle with others, but stayed away by himself, knowing no law, for he was formed as a wondrous monster, not like a man, an eater of bread, but like a wooded peak of the high mountains which stands out to view alone, apart from others. In his outsmarting of the Cyclops, Odysseus displays the power that lets a puny human master a gigantic brute, but in his glorying Odysseus outsmarts himself, and ends up no better than a Cyclops. Finally, Odysseus is measured against the gods. This is most apparent in his verbal jousting with Athena when he awakens on Ithaca in Book XIII. She uses superhuman knowledge and magic to deceive and test and tease him, while he holds his own with his merely human skills, to her delight. Thats my boy, she says in effect, and he replies, in effect, So where have you been for so long. But this alliance of man and goddess as friendly rivals is not the one that is his true test. It is Kalypso who offers him the ultimate choice, to be her lover forever, while neither of them grows old, on an island that grows everything to delight the senses and requires no work. He chooses to go back into the sea, to work, to ght, to take chances, and ultimately to die. He does not talk about any of this in the story he tells the Phaiakians, though he had told

the king and queen the bare outline of it the day before. We know the story of Kalypsos island from Homers telling of it, before we know how to understand it. It is Odysseus who puts it in context. From the time, early in Book X, when he comes down from the mountain on Circes island, the rest of Odysseuss story is about his losing battle to win back the trust of his companions. I am in no way like the gods, he has said to Alkinous, but count me equal to whomever you know among humans who bears the heaviest load of woe. (VII, 208-212) But unlike another man who might say that, Odysseus had a choice, and chose human troubles. What he lost, with his companions, was more worthy of choice to him, than what he could gain from Kalypsos gift. We make much of Achilless choice, to live a short and glorious life instead of a long and ordinary one, and pay less attention to Odysseuss choice, to live not at ease forever but for a long but bounded time, amid troubles that will eventually come to an end. You probably know that the rst word of the Iliad is wrath; of the Odyssey the rst word is man. The shaping of the Iliad rises from the are-up of Achilless wrath, to come to completion when that wrath itself nds its limit, not just in duration but in submission to a higher good; the wrathful, warlike side of human life nds its form and proportion within a larger whole. The Odyssey is formed in a different way. It starts in three places (Olympus, Ogygia, and Ithaca). It backs up, and proceeds for a while on parallel tracks, as we hear a story told and watch the interaction of the teller and hearers, and nally begins moving forward in its second half. But through and through, the form that shapes the Odyssey is the form of the human being, as it shows us a man travelling up to all the limits of what it is to be human, coming to know them, and choosing to remain within them. A participle in the fth line of the poem (arnumenos), as it is usually translated, credits Odysseus for saving his life, but it has a richer meaning: he earned or achieved his life, proved worthy of it by learning that it was worthy of his choice. The Phaiakians understand his story, and honor his choice by making one in its image: they choose to risk their easy life by taking on

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his troubles as their own, and their journey to Ithaca is their last carefree voyage. The rst thing we hear about the Phaiakians is that they live far away from men who earn their bread (VI, 8), but the human form becomes visible to them in Odysseus, and draws them out of their isolation. In the west pediment at Olympia, human dignity is made visible in the gure of Apollo. In the toils and troubles of Odysseus at sea, human worth becomes apparent against a background of goddesses and monsters and bad choices. The beauty of the Phaiakians action is set against the perversion of the human image in the young suitors who have taken over Ithaca. The suitors are worse than the Centaurs at Olympia, who are simply appetites that have not yet come under control. The suitors have no respect for any man or woman (XXII. 414-15), and so they cannot be reformed. What they cannot recognize, they cannot take as formative. Their image, in their feasting, reects that of the human pigs on Circes island; in their obliviousness to someone elses home, it reects that of the lotus eaters; and in their reasoning that Telemachus is about to become an obstacle to their pleasure and so, of course, should be killed, they are no different from the cannibal Cyclops. Odysseus knows what to do when immortality is offered to him, because he has learned to respect the claims of human need, and wants to redeem his loss of his companions, for which he bears not all, but enough, of the blame. And he will have to use the same standard to decide what to do about the suitors. But in Ithaca and abroad, in the story that surrounds that of Odysseus, there is a gallery of portraits of simple human dignity. They work on us to convey the power we respect in old people whose experience has brought them understanding. One of them is Nestor, who responds to strangers rst by feeding them and only afterward asking whether they are pirates. (III. 69-74) Pre-eminent among these gures is Eumaeus, the swineherd, a victim of pirates; born the son of a king (XV . 412), he was kidnapped and sold into slavery, but came to accept his lot as the lowliest of servants with no bitterness (XIV . 140-147). He balances the picture of life on Ithaca:

as the suitors have turned a palace into a pig-sty, Eumaeus, with his courtesy and shrewd judgement, has turned a pig-sty into a place of gracious hospitality. Homer refers to him as the godlike swineherd (XIV . 401, 413), and as the swineherd, rst in the ranks of men (XVII. 184). But surrounding and woven through all these portraits of age and wisdom is the un-regarded gure of Mentor. Odysseus had left him in charge in Ithaca (II. 225-7), but his power to rule rested on nothing but respect. With the invasion of the suitors, the foundation of civilized life on Ithaca collapsed, and in the resulting chaos we hardly notice Mentor, since he cannot ght, and barely raises his voice. He is gloried in the last line of the poem, when Athena, in a poetic equivalent of the sculpted gure of Apollo at Olympia, has put an end to the violent strife of people who are all alike (XXIV . 543), making herself recognizable in the voice and living form of Mentor. These last words of the whole poem conrm our sense that its rst word, man, is what it intends to reveal to us, and the nal embodiment of that revelation is in a radiant presentation of a character so humble the poet had to compel us to notice him at all, a character whose dignity lives only in the medium of our respect, while that dignity, in turn, is the only foundation for shared human life. Homer makes us err, in overlooking Mentor, and come to ourselves in recognizing him, so that, in a small way, we mimic Odysseuss journey.

But if we are to take the human measure from Mentor, that must mean that he displays human excellence, and that would be a very strange claim to make. The poet Homer can play in a serious way by putting the kingly soul of Eumaeus in a position in which he has only pigs to rule over, and he can leave us with the vision of a goddess who makes a humble man resplendent, but neither of these gures seems to display any maximum of human possibility. Instead, what we seem to see in them is the last shred of dignity that cannot be taken away from any human being by any sort of mistreatment from others, but can only be lost by ones own act. When

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Odysseus comes out of the sea alone on the island of the Phaiakians, he burrows under a pile of leaves. Here is the way Homer describes this action: As when someone hides away a glowing ember in a black ash heap at the end of the earth, with no countrymen anywhere near, no others at all, saving the seed of re in a place where there is no other source from which he could start a re, so did Odysseus cover himself up with leaves. (V , 488-91) Odysseus almost lost himself on his journey. And the thing that nearly smothered the last spark of humanity in him was his drive to excel.
We are told in the third line of the poem that many were the people whose cities he saw and whose intellects he knew, and for Odysseus every new experience was a test. Seeing and knowing were never for their own sake for him. He was always taking the measure of any new places and their inhabitants, and that, for him, came to be for its own sake, continually to prove himself more than the equal of any kind of skill or strength or strategem, and worthy of respect from anything that exists that can pay respect. He wanted to go beyond anywhere others had been, to nd every limit and surpass it. This ts a conventional understanding of excellence, but it makes no sense. It aims at nothing but beyond everything, so that the task is innite and formless. To achieve excellence in this way is to measure oneself against what is measureless. Only a being of innite capacity could be genuinely successful. One image of human nitude in the Odyssey is our need to sleep. The journey from Aeolia to Ithaca is long and hard, but achievable, but also just barely longer than anyone could stay awake for. With a dangerous cargo like the bag of winds, a sensible captain will have to admit his own limits to himself, and take someone else into his condence, but Odysseus does not permit himself such weakness. That stubbornness costs him more than nine years of trouble, and eventually costs every one of his companions his life. When we see Odysseus give way to sleep again, the meaning is exactly the opposite of the former occasion. His sleep brings to an end his efforts to persuade his

comrades, and they eat forbidden meat and die; they decide that they are no heroes, and cannot hold out indenitely against hunger. Afterward, Odysseus never ceases to defend them. But it is usually not his companions themselves that he refers to, but the common lot of human beings that he discovered by paying attention to them. No less than six times he lectures people about the cursed belly, and the things its need can drive people to (VII. 215-21; XV . 343-5; XVII. 286-9, 473-4; XVIII. 53-4; XIX. 71-4). The man who once despised weakness in himself is now the erce defender of those whose strength fails them. His rejection of the offer of immortality is in part a gesture of solidarity with his companions, and his disguise as a beggar on Ithaca in some way displays the truth. In front of the Phaiakians, Odysseus could have told his story to present himself as the hero of Troy, the most important man in the world, but he chooses instead to make his loss and his need central. He tells one of the suitors Nothing feebler than a human being does the earth sustain, of all the things that breathe and crawl on the earth (XVIII, 130-1), using the same adjective he chose when telling Kalypso I know very well that thoughtful Penelope is feebler than you in both form and stature (V , 215-17). He has learned to see what is fragile in us and in need of protection as having a higher claim on his effort than any extraordinary achievements that might extend human glory. But the radiant dignity conferred on Mentor at the poems end, and glowing from within Eumaeus in its midst, is not the whole of the human image either. There is also heroic action that is not ambitious for glory but called forth in defence of what is dignied but weak. In Aristotles ethics the word that names human dignity is spoud, seriousness, the quality that is apparent in certain exceptional people who know what to take seriously. But in the Odyssey the focus is on aids, respect, the quality present in all of us that enables us to recognize dignity. Respect can take the place of force, and can bind together a community, establishing the conditions of life under which the things that have seriousness and dignity can be given their due. The actions that embody respect constitute what

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Aristotle calls distributive justice, the paying of what is due not merely in the quantitative medium of money but by reference always to the qualitative medium of honor. In a just community, according to Aristotle, there will never be simple equality, but rather proportional equality, actions and titles and gestures that make evident what different people deserve. And this is what Socrates called geometrical equality, since it requires an act of seeing rather than one of calculating. In the Odyssey, our seeing is put to work most vividly beyond the world in which we live and make choices, envisioning the Cyclops, the passage between Scylla and Charybdis, or Odysseus lashed to the mast while the Sirens sing, but as in the west pediment at Olympia, these gures depicted as outwardly visible display the shape of the invisible human soul. The soul that Homer lets us recognize as unsurpassably right in its ordering is the one that we see in the hero in rags, in his feeble old father in armor (XXIV . 513-25), in the boy who calls an assembly of adults, in the woman who neutralizes the strength of 108 men (XVI. 245-51) and stops time itself for four years by unweaving every night what she wove by day (II. 94-110). It is the human balance in which strength has reason to give way to weakness, and weakness has resources to nd strength. It is the human mean that can live only within a community. The best human life is a topic that demands philosophic reection, but such reection would not be possible if one could not, in the rst place, simply see its form.

NOTE: The central importance in the Odyssey of the respectful attitude aids that makes human communities possible is something I rst learned by reading Mary Hannah Joness senior essay, A First Reading of the Odyssey, included in the collection of St. Johns College Prize Papers, 1977-78.

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Plato and the Measure of the Incommensurable

Part II. Platos New Measure: The Mathematical Meaning of the Indeterminate Dyad
Amirthanayagam David
I shall argue that the controversial developmentssome would say the reversalsin Platos later metaphysical outlook were in fact an inspired response to some truly epochal developments in the mathematics of his day; in particular, to certain seminal advances in the theory of the irrational. Following on my reading of the geometry lesson at Theaetetus 147, and of its signicance for that dialogue and for the Sophist and the Politicus, I can now shed light on one of the most obscure notions associated with Plato, a thing known to Aristotle as the indeterminate dyad. The discovery and description of this remarkable objectremarkable, all right, yet thoroughly nonmystical and mathematically legitimatecan be seen as the motive force behind some of the arguments and constructs in the late dialogue Philebus. In interpreting the ancient testimony, my reconstruction demonstrates that the mathematical meaning of the late Platonic metaphysics was either not transmitted to, or simply lost on, the successors of Plato and their critic Aristotle. But where the philosophers strayed, the mathematicians found a fruitful path: the conclusion to the work started by Theaetetus and Plato nds a home of concision and elegance in the mathematics of Euclids Book X. A historian of ancient philosophy may have to distinguish in future between the academics who inherited Platos arguments, and the mathematicians who understood them.

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Perhaps the best evidence for a revision, radical or not, in Platos thought comes from Aristotles intellectual biography in Metaphysics A. He there refers to a ka steron, an even afterwards in Platos career (987b1). The passage is explicit that there was a before and an after in Platos thinking which was not apparently dened by the death of Socrates. What is more, the change was apparently of some considerable moment; the whole force of the expression is in the ka; Plato is said to have accepted the premise of universal ux espoused by Cratylus and the Heracliteans, even afterwards. The theory of sensation we have discussed in the Theaetetus is an example of his new approach to an old premise, an approach based on a new mathematics of measurement. At one time during the geometry lesson in the Meno, Socrates counsels the slave boy, who is trying to nd the line from which a square the double of a given square is generated, if you do not care to count it out, just point out what line it comes from (e m bolei rivmen, ll dexon p poa$, 84a). This is the vintage Socratic irony, a playful but possibly sinister half-telling: there is in fact no straightforward way to count out such a line with the same unit measures that count off the side of the given square. In a passage that means to inspire condence in our ability to learn, Socrates hints at a shadowy impediment that lurks, even as the slave boy triumphs. This problem of incommensurability was the bane of measurement sciencemetrhtik, that science which assigns number to continuous magnitudeperhaps onwards from the time of Pythagoras. Measurement pr$ llhla, or mutual measurement, the reciprocal subtraction (nvufaresi$) of two magnitudes, came to an end or limit (pra$) at the common measure of these magnitudes; but if the magnitudes were incommensurable, the process of subtracting the less from the greater, and then the remainder from the less, would continue indenitely (i.e., it was unlimited, peiron). Such everyday magnitudes as the diagonals of squares with countable sides were rrhton, inexpressible, or

logon, irrational, in terms of those sides, an embarrassment to

any serious measurement science. The in-betweenness of irrational lengths with respect to rational (countable) onesin the Meno, Socrates takes pains to show by a narrowing process that the required length, the side of an eightfoot square, lies somewhere in between two and three feet (83ce)may have been the clue to a new approach. Platos Stranger proposes a new branch of measurement science in the Politicus (283d ff.); alongside measurement pr$ llhla, there is now to be measurement pr$ tn to metrou gnesin, measurement toward the generation of the mean. I have suggested that Theaetetus seemingly humble classication of roots (Theaetetus 147c ff.) was the ultimate inspiration for this formulation; his novel use of the mean proportional allows number and magnitude (the phenomena of arithmetic and geometry) to be subsumed successfully under a revitalised and heuristic measurement science. Squaring is the nding of the mean ( tetragwnism$ msh$ eresi$, De Anima 413a20), and he who denes it this way, says Aristotle, is showing the cause of the fact in his denition. To square a given rectangle, one has to nd the mean proportional between the lengths of its sides. Theaetetus distinguishes between two kinds of length as sides of squares: a mko$ is the length of a side of a square number (4, 9, 16, etc.), the mean proportional (or geometric mean) between the unit and a square number; a dnami$ is the side of a square equal to a rectangular number (2, 3, 5, 6, etc.)i.e., the geometric mean between the unit and a rectangular numberwhich is incommensurable with the unit in length (mkei) but commensurable with it in square (dunmei). Taken by itself, this classication is hardly more than a new way of naming the phenomena of measurement science. Even at this stage, however, the roots of non-square numbers, formerly irrational and intractable, have become more expressible (@ht); they are at least commensurable in square. A third category can now be envisionedincommensurability in length and in square so that where we had a polar division of opposites (rational-irra-

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tional), now we have an enumeration of the phenomena: rational, expressible, irrational. But the true mathematical utility of this re-classication lies in the lucid quality of the geometric mean. We recall that for any interval, this mean can be approximated in length by interpolating successive pairs of arithmetic and harmonic means within the given extremes. Since in a rational interval, like that between the unit and a non-square number, the interpolated means are also rational, and since they dene an evanescent sequence of rational intervals around the same geometric mean, the incommensurable roots of non-square numbers can now be systematically approximated with numbers of their own. Each of these lengths, which we nowadays call 2, 3, 5, etc., is approximated as a geometric mean by one or more series, each unique and innite, of arithmetic and harmonic means, which give better and better rational over- and under-estimates (respectively) of each incommensurable length. Though the geometric mean is never reached, each successive pair of interpolations reduces the interval containing it by more than half, so that each of the approximating extremes approaches closer than any given difference to the mean (by Euclids X.1). Hence the process is unlimited in its degree of accuracy. The uniqueness of each of these dyadic series, corresponding to each of the incommensurable roots, is the key to their achievement. Numbers may now be introduced, in a mathematically useful and rigorous way, to describe the lengths of these roots. Measurement science can thereby full its mission, once paralysed in these cases, to number the greater and the less. Irrational roots are no longer vaguely in between: each dyad of interpolated means denes all rational lengths, whole or fractional, than which a particular incommensurable root is greater, and all than which it is less. Since the dyadic interval can be made to shrink indenitely, these incommensurable lengths have been uniquely measured in terms of a given unit, as uniquely as any commensurable length. A rational length is measured by one number, a one many, a single collection of so- and so-many units (and fractional parts).

These lengths are therefore measured both absolutely and relatively in terms of the unit length; one can answer the question, How many is it? with respect to them. An irrational but expressible length, on the other hand, is measured by a series of pairs of numbers, a unique but unlimited or indeterminate dyad (risto$ da$). Such lengths are only relatively measured in terms of the unit; for them, one cannot answer the question How many is it? with a denite number, but one can always answer the question, Is it greater or less than this many? There are now two ways in which number can be applied to continuous magnitudewith a normal rivm$ measured by the unit, or an indeterminate dyad of such rivmoso that both the diagonal and the side of a square can be counted off in terms of the same unit length. The original signicance of the unit and the indeterminate dyad can now be recognised in the context of the new branch of measurement science: the former, already a principle and product of the existing branch, measurement pr$ llhlafor the unit is the measure of all commensurable magnitudes, and the ultimate result of the reciprocal subtraction of commensurable quantities is a measure of all rational means (including the roots of square numbers). The latter is a way of measuring all the expressible geometric means (the roots of rectangular numbers); it is a principle and product unique to the new branch, measurement toward the generation of the mean, for paired interpolation represents a way to generate an expressible geometric mean numerically, and the resulting indeterminate dyad of greater and lesser values is a precise and exhaustive way to locate an expressible length within the scale of the rational continuum. The unit and the indeterminate dyad, the respective measures of rational and expressible means, are therefore rightly conceived as the two proper principles of that science which approaches measurement through the construction of means.

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In the Philebus (23c ff.), Socrates proposes a four-part division of all beings. The rst two segments cover the limited and the unlimited, the once all-embracing Pythagorean pair of opposites. The third division encompasses those beings produced by the mixture of the polar principles; this mixed category represents the distinctive late Platonic innovation in ontological thinking, outlined also in the Sophist (see 252e). A fourth division is enumerated to cover the cause of the mixing in the category of mixed beings. At rst glance, the mathematical subtext of this classication seems fairly straightforward. The unlimited stands for continuous magnitude, that which admits of being greater or less (24e); the limited stands for number and measure (25a-b). The mixed class stands, as could be expected, for continuous phenomena that admit of measurement or a scale: Socrates mentions music, weather, the seasons, and all beautiful things (sa kal pnta, 26a-b). The demiurge of the Timaeus, who constructs a cosmic musical scale out of elements he has mixed (35b ff.), could be seen as a mythical archetype of the fourth kind of being, the cause of mixing. The mixer is also a measurer. Certain peculiarities in Platos presentation suggest, however, that it is motivated by the developments in ancient measurement theory that I have described. First of all, the distinction made between the limited and the unlimited is virtually analytic. This would not be necessary for a distinction between number and magnitude, because of the phenomenon of commensurability. But the class of the more and the less, the pair which characterises the unlimited, is said to disallow the existence of denite quantity; if it were to allow quantity (posn) and the mean (t mtrion) to be generated in the seat of its domain (dr ggensvai), the moreand-less themselves (a dual subject in Platos Greek) would be made to wander from the place where they properly exist (24c-d). The class of the unlimited therefore stands for the greater-and-less qua greater and less, those magnitudes which refuse numerical measurement of any kind, like the radically incommensurable lengths

(commensurable neither in length nor in square). The class of the limited, on the other hand, is said to cover only those things which admit of everything opposite to the more-and-less (totwn d t nanta pnta decmena):

prton mn t son ka sthta, met d t son t diplsion ka pn tiper n pr$ rivmn rivm$ mtron pr$ mtron...
(25a-b) rst the equal and equality, and after the equal the double and everything whatever which is a number in relation to a number or a measure to a measure.

The limited is therefore the class of commensurable magnitude. Is the distinction between limited and unlimited then a descriptive one based on that between number and magnitude, or really an analytic one between two kinds of magnitude, the commensurable and the incommensurable? The mixed class is also described as the class (da) of the equal and the double (25d); this means it must be meant to include within it the whole class of the limited or commensurable. One could have expected this if it corresponds to a class of scalable magnitudes. But Socrates goes on to add this curious category to its domain:
...ka psh paei pr$ llhla tnanta

diafrw$ conta, smmetra d ka smfwna nvesa rivmn pergzetai (25d-e)

also so much of a class as stops things which are opposites, differently disposed to one another, and fashions them into things commensurable and harmonious by putting in number.

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This function appears to be unique to the mixed kind of being. Since only incommensurable things can be made commensurable, the unlimited did indeed signify the incommensurable, as was surmised; and the class mixed from the limited and the unlimited appears to include a new species not found in either apart, which makes incommensurable magnitudes commensurable by putting in or inserting (ntvhmi) number. With somewhat uncharacteristic acuity, Protarchus understands Socrates to mean that certain constructions (or generations, gensei$) follow from the mixing of the Pythagorean opposites (25e). (This interchange seems to be a single Platonic exposition split between two speakers. The author better remembers his dramatic premises when, within less than a Stephanus page, he has Protarchus suddenly express his unsureness about what Socrates could have meant by the members of the third class.) The two ways of measuring magnitude in terms of a single unit length, by means of a number or an indeterminate dyad of numbers, correspond to the two classes which make up Socrates third category. In particular, the second way of measuring corresponds to that construction described above which is unique to the mixed category. Both take up magnitudes that were formerly irreconcilable, subsumed by an opposition of greater to lessi.e., incommensurables belonging to the category of the unlimitedand make them concordant and commensurable by inserting number. But neither of them does this in such a way as thereby to reduce these magnitudes to the class of the limited. Rather, certain lengths turn up in the measurement of magnitude, incommensurable as such but commensurable in square, that call forth a peculiar application of number, one which inserts greater and lesser values in such a way that they become more and more equal. This use of numbers comes to light only in measurement science, and hence only in the mixed category of beings; it does not suggest itself in the operations of pure arithmetic, the science of the class of the limited (governing numerable, discrete quanta and their formal equivalents, like commensurable lengths). An indeterminate dyad is a numerical description of

a peculiar kind of length, neither irrational nor rational, but belonging to a third analytic class called expressible. The mathematical subtext of Socrates proposal therefore runs as follows: the distinction between unlimited, limited, and mixed is, after all, a descriptive one based on that between magnitude, number, and measured magnitude. But when Socrates attempts to bring unity to each category, drawing together into one (e$ n, 25a, 25d, etc.) the beings subsumed by each, he employs a threepart analytic distinction that applies properly to magnitude alone. That is to say, he brings unity to each of the three realmsnumber, magnitude, and measured magnitudeby describing each of them in terms of the particular kind of length, the particular kind of one-dimensional magnitude, which uniquely characterises it. Hence the class of the unlimited is not just the class of the greaterand-less, but the class which positively rejects numerical description, like that of the radically incommensurable lengths. (The analogy is strict, for recall that this class is said to reject from its own rightful seat both denite quantity (posn) and the mean (t mtrion); on my reconstruction, this means it rejects the only two ways of counting lengths, either with a single number, or with an indeterminate dyad of numbers that approximate a geometric mean.) The class of the limited, likewise, is not just the class of numerable things, things which can be expressed as ratios of a number to a number, but also the class of certain kinds of magnitude, those which can be expressed as ratios of a measure to a measure, for commensurable lengths share all the properties of numbers. Hence the distinction between magnitude and number (unlimited and limited) can be reduced to a distinction between two kinds of line. And nally, the mixed class, or the class of the scale, though it includes within it the class of the limited, comes to be characterised by a use of numbers and a kind of magnitude which are each unique to it. These are the indeterminate dyad and the lengths which it measures, once incommensurable but now made expressible by the insertion of number. The expressible

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roots form a third analytic possibility within the eld of onedimensional extension, alongside rational and irrational lines. The reductionist spirit of Socrates analysis is in the best traditions of ancient mathematics. To reduce one problem to another is of course heuristic of a solution, but the process can also be useful in denitions and classications. An example has been given in Aristotles reduction of the problem of squaring to that of nding a mean proportional line. One effect of Euclids proposition II.14, which contains a solution to Aristotles reduced problem, is in turn to reduce a comparison in magnitude between any rectilinear gures to a comparison between squares, and hence to a comparison in one dimension, between square roots. A later and particularly virtuosic example is to be found in Apollonius use of the three kinds of application of area upon lines, the parabolic, hyperbolic, and elliptic, to both name and dene the three kinds of conic section. In Platos case, the distinctions between his ontological realms of the unlimited, limited, and mixedtwo of which, as opposites, had had a long-standing currency in metaphysical thinkinghave been reduced to the distinctions between the three kinds of line studied in the new measurement science: irrational lines that are incommensurable both in length and in square; rational lines that are commensurable both in length and in square; and the expressible lines that are incommensurable in length, but commensurable in square. This analysis is also in the spirit of the enumerative method Socrates had earlier set out (16c-17a). One is to seek out the form (da) which lends unity to a eld of phenomena, and then seek out those things measured by this hypothetical unit-form (i.e., those phenomena which are numbers if the original form is taken as a unit). The method intends to be self-correcting, for one is enjoined in turn to analyse the original unit (t kat rc$ n, 16d) in the same way that one has analysed the enumerated phenomena, to see how many it might actually be. A converse procedure is equally espoused in the case of a science like grammar (18a-d): when the datum seems unlimited or continuous, as does the phenomenon of

human vocalisation, one is rst to discover the numbers into which it naturally divides, which govern pluralities such as those marked out by the distinction between vowels and consonants, before one proceeds to analyse these further into their units. There may be an analogy here with modern analyses in terms of sets, which also presume that things need to be sorted before they can be counted or related. Euclids denition of ratio (V .3) requires a relation of kind between the compared terms. Even the innite eld of number itself is nowadays divided in such a way that unitary types may be distinguished (Reals over Rationals and Irrationals) while individual members remain both innite and innitely instantiatable. An enumerative theory of forms would seem to reect the ontological and epistemological implications of the interdependence of sorting, on the one hand, and counting or measuring on the other. The new Socratic method is developed as an explicit reaction to the Parmenidean or Pythagorean type of thinkerbut also, perhaps, to the early Platowho analyses everything in terms of opposed principles like the one and the many or the limited and the unlimited, and fails to articulate the crucial phenomena that are ordered, like numbers, in between such opposites. Hasty and simplistic analysis in terms of opposites is said to characterise arguments that are made eristically, while the enumerative method, the method that discovers the numbers of things and their ordered relations, characterises the truly dialectical approach (17a). Socrates had earlier made it clear (14d-15c) that the familiar paradoxes of the one and the many were no longer his concern. Any lazy riddler could prove that an individual like Protarchus, or a thing made up of parts, was at the same time one and many. It was the possibility of formal unity, in the face of the sensible births and deaths of numberless individuals, the unity that is asserted of things in discoursewhether of man or of ox or of the beautiful or the goodthat was of vital philosophical interest. Did any such units exist? How might they persist as individuals? And how is it that they partake of the innite multiplicity of things that come into being? The genuineness of these perplexities calls forth

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his enumerative approach, a philosophical pathway that Socrates says he had ever loved, but which had often deserted him in the past (16b). The method is hard, but the results can apparently be astonishing; all the achievements of the arts (tcnai) are said to have been discovered on this road (16c). The implications of this method, shot through as it is with the inuence of the burgeoning measurement science, are staggering for the classical Plato. Consider that we are here hypothesizing the existence of forms as measures, enumerating phenomena in terms of a posited unit-form, and then examining the posited unit, presumably against the phenomena themselves, to check for its possible plurality. The method itself is therefore mixed, in such a way as to cancel Platos earlier formulations. Neither is this the unhypothetical reasoning from forms to forms, whatever that may have meant in The Republic, nor is it a reasoning from unquestioned hypotheses, in the manner of synthetic geometry. The once eternal forms, the objects and immutable guarantors of knowledge, have become provisional and heuristic. God is said to have made all beings out of the one and the many with the limited and the unlimited as innate possessions (16c). This would tend to insure that all phenomena will be inherently numerable, and hence to guarantee their susceptibility to an enumerative method; we shall nd the unifying form, for it is in there (ersein gr nosan, 16d). It is as though the pairs of opposed ontological elements, once the principles of the eristic disputations, have now been re-packaged in the premises, made the condition for the possibility of an enumerable reality. Inasmuch as it was Aristotles understanding (Metaphysics M.4, 1078b12) that the theory of forms was invented in the rst place to account for our sense of dependable knowledge in the face of a Heraclitean uxand note that the premise of a reality in ux is still accepted at Philebus 43ait seems that this theory has now been modied to make sense not so much of our ability to know as of our ability to count. And this change of purpose is sparked in turn by a renewed condence in this sovereign ability, in light of Theaetetus successful attack on

the irrational. Number had at last been restored to some of her Pythagorean glory, as a measure of the things that are, that they are, and the things that are not, that they are not, and what is more, of the things in between. The victory here was sweet indeed, for the irrational square roots were recovered from the domain of ux and incommensurability on the very terms by which this domain is distinguished. The indeterminate dyad is both a measurement and a process of measurement: interpolating means between means involves a measurer and a thing measured which are continually changing, just as in the Heraclitean or Protagorean contentions; yet this process of itself yields a unique measure of the xed mean proportional between the interpolated means, and makes expressible and commensurable the once irrational root of a rectangular number. Indeed, this process of measuring or counting in an indeterminate dyad has proved to be revelatory of form, in the sense that it creates the class of the expressible and denes the mixed category of being. On the one hand, things need to be sorted before they can be counted, and hence the knowledge of form has primacy over measurement, and the ability to count depends upon the ability to know. But it would seem in this case that the act of measurement can itself be disclosive of form, and hence that knowing can depend on counting. There appears therefore to be a dialectical relationship between sorting and counting, which is reected in a self-correcting, enumerative theory of forms. This methodology of the Philebus can be seen as reincorporating certain aspects of the Pythagorean, in the sense that once again, knowledge has become coordinated with measurement, and to know something is in some sense to comprehend its number. Condence in the grounds of an enumerative approach to the sensible worlda condence that may once have deserted Socrates in the face of an irrational diameter, leading him, with Menos honest slave, to the abyss of ironycan allow that signicant guarantees of veracity will come from the method itself. There are, for example, different ways to count or measure a phenomenon,

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each of them legitimate, based on the premises and aims of the investigator, as the several alternate divisions of the sophist and the statesman make clear. One measure of the truth of a hypothesis, that such-and-such a form is a genuine unit, must, under this method, be the economy and scope of the enumeration it affords, as a unit in fact. A criterion for a successful articulation, a guarantor that a dialectical enumeration corresponds to a real one in the world, must therefore be the elegance of that articulation, in terms of the economy of means and breadth of cover which problemsolving mathematicians have always striven for in the concrete practice of their art. Indeed, it is an informed sense of respect for developments and concrete formulations in the arts that seems to move the older Plato. In the spheres of grammar and music, for example, although it appears that an abstract analysis in terms of opposites, in the manner of the sofo, may to some extent be applied in the interpretation of phenomena, by itself such abstract analysis simply does not make you much of a useful theorist (17b-c). An investigation into the numbers and kinds of sounds, on the other hand, or an enumeration of the different scales and modes and the vagaries of rhythmthese, it seems, can truly render you wiser than the common run, in music and in grammar. Behind this sensitivity of Platos to the enumerative and the concrete aspects of the arts, as against the approach through dogmatic rst principles, may rest his experience of the dramatic changes in the mathematics of his day. A distinction like that between the rational and the irrational, which must have seemed as basic to the science as that between odd and even numbersan eternal, immutable opposition, seemingly a part and principle of the order of thingswas made obsolete by the emergence into history of a new formulation through the mind of a single, brilliant practitioner. Recall that Theaetetus reforms began very humbly on the level of classication and denition: he makes the distinction between square and non-square the basic one for number, beyond the distinctions between, say, odd and even or prime and compos-

ite. But of itself this suggests a new way to approach the measurement of lengths, as geometric means, and this further yields, or reveals, a third, formally distinct category of magnitude called expressible. Experiencing this revolutionary development, as witness or participant, must lead a thinker away from a view of t mavhmatik as eternal, innate verities that can be investigated and learned as though by recollection, towards a view of mathematics that must acknowledge the importance and ingenuity of the problem-solver in situ, together with the power of classications, denitions and measurements to reveal, or to obscure, the fundamental nature of their objects. As the traditional theory of forms and the doctrine of mvhsi$ nmnhsi$ can be seen as responding to the ontology and epistemology of the earlier geometry, so can a selfcorrecting, enumerative theory of forms be seen as a response to the ontological and epistemological implications of the new mathematics and a dynamic measurement science. Insofar as other arts aspire to the mathematical, the new philosophical outlook must also apply to them; although, to be fair, the provisional, enumerative approach would have long since guided the formulations of practitioners in music and grammar, without a felt need for a mathematical paradigm or a philosophers blessing. Perhaps one should credit Plato only with waking up to the new realities of science and art around him, much in the spirit of later revolutions in philosophy. One need not qualify, however, ones estimate of the implications of this change of view for Platos political thought; they are as great as the differences between the Republic and the Laws. In this vein, while Platos guardians had learnt their lessons and then interpreted the world, so that nature and politics alike would have been for them a kind of applied mathematics, Platos statesman is of an altogether different mould of mathematician. He is a problem solver, in amongst it like a navigator or a physician, who must be able to adapt his laws to suit changing conditions, or improve upon his formulations to serve the present (see Politicus 295c ff., 300c). It is of course notorious that the guardians inability to solve a problemthe numbering of love, and

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its irrational quantitiesleads inexorably to the degeneration of their regime.

o gr mpote toto dam, enai m nta

For this may never be enforced, that things which are not, are.

In Metaphysics N, Aristotle introduces his redaction and criticism of the Platonist (or Academic) metaphysics with this statement: All thinkers make the principles opposites (pnte$ d poiosi t$ rc$ nanta$, 1087a30). There appear to have been various schools of thought among Academic ontologists, all of whom posited the unit as a rst principle or element, but each of whom disagreed as to the nature of the opposite principle, whether it was the greater-and-less or the unequal or plurality. Aristotle makes short shrift of all these formulations, as they treat affections and attributes and relative terms as substances (1088a16). In N.2, he mentions a group who posit the indeterminate dyad as the opposed element, as a way of getting around some difculties in the other versions; but it is still a relative principle, and in addition, all these formulations fall to Aristotles argument that eternal things simply cannot be composed of elements (1088b28-35). Aristotle then feels, before he adumbrates his own approach to ontology, that he must explain why these thinkers ever came up with formulations so narrow and forced, constrained as they are by the dogma of opposed principles (1088b35 ff.). His answer is that they had framed the problem of ontological multiplicity in an oldfashioned way (rcaik$, 1089a1-2), for they were still arguing in response to certain paradoxes of Parmenides. The implications of this reconstruction of recent intellectual history are decisive both for our sense of Aristotles access to Plato, and for our knowledge of Academic thought and its relation to Plato. All the Academics, and thus Plato as well, are said to reason about existence in terms of an opposed pair of rst principlesalways the unit and something else; they do this under the direct inuence of Parmenides, perhaps as part of a tradition of arguing against certain eristic dogmas of his, such as the one which Aristotle quotes:

These thinkers are said to have felt that the possibility of multiplicity in the world would be threatened unless Parmenides were refuted, and some other thing than unity or being were allowed to exist. This was the origin of the relative principles that stood opposite the unit. The unit and the indeterminate dyad, on this scheme of Aristotles, are but one alternative among several pairs of rst principles proposed by different Academic philosophers. The rst thing to note is that the Philebus itself is Platos direct and unambiguous criticism of the ontological reasoning based on two opposed principles, in favour of a technical, empirical, enumerative approach. From the perspective of philosophical method, the dialogue can hardly be said to have any other point. Plato conceived of his enumerative method as a more illuminating and more useful way of articulating phenomena, which comes to yield signicant new categories in the analysis of being (e.g., the mixed one and the cause of mixing). No further clue seems to be necessary for the conclusion: Aristotle, somehow or another, has entirely missed the point of Platos late formulations, by classing them with the type that Plato himself characterises as eristic rather than dialectical, and from which he most particularly wants to distinguish his own. The next point, however, is that there must actually have been a vigorous tradition of thought which both preceded Plato and outlasted him in his own Academy, characterised by the use of opposites as rst principles. To believe so much is the only way to attach any seriousness to Aristotles redaction. This tradition originates with Parmenides, and must once have included Plato in its ranks, again if one is to pay any respect to Aristotles judgement. But Plato came to argue against such thinkers not only in the Philebus, but also in the Sophist, where they are called the friends of the forms (o tn edn floi, 248a). These were the lat-

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ter-day champions of eternal, immutable, unmixing forms, the kind of weary theoretical construct that is often now taught as Platonism. When the differences seem so clear, the question must become: How could Platos new mixed ontology have come to be confused with the old-fashioned approach through polar principles? Recall that on my reading of the Philebus, there are for Plato three ontological realms apart from the agent of cause. The rst is the realm of the limit, the realm of arithmetic, whose principle is the unit. The second is the realm of the unlimited; its principle, analytically opposed to the unit, is the dual greater-and-less, the principle of irrational ux. The third realm is that of the mixed beings, which I have interpreted as the realm of measurable things. Its principles are two, and reect the two ways that magnitudes may be numbered or made commensurable, absolutely in terms of the unit or relatively (but uniquely) by an indeterminate dyad. The thing to note is that the unit appears as a principle twice in this scheme, opposed in two different ways to two different things. The distinction between the unit and the greater-and-less is strictly analytic, and belongs squarely in the Parmenidean tradition; whereas the distinction between the unit and the indeterminate dyad is merely descriptive, serving to recognise ways of applying numbers inside the sphere of measurement that happen not to arise in arithmetic. The unit and the dyad are therefore not opposites; they are simply different. If a thinker in the Parmenidean tradition, or a historian of the Parmenidean tradition, were to interpret Platos scheme in light of their own practices, or to force it into a Parmenidean mould to atter a historical premise, the conation of the two distinctions would be an inevitable result. If the Philebus could not be consultedif it were grafo$ in the sense unpublishedno recourse could be had to the original reasoning; but even if there were such recourse, Platos three realms of number, magnitude, and measure, and the important differences between the distinctions unit/greater-and-less and unit/indeterminate dyad, could only be understood in light of

an underlying mathematical paradigm, as I have argued. Such a thinker or such a historian would not be likely to know or to care about the analytic possibilities in one dimension. (This is as much as to say, he would not know what was meant by the indeterminate dyad.) He will look for the polar principles in any ontological scheme; at best he will see that the indeterminate dyad must connote something different from the greater-and-less, as the principle chosen to stand opposite the unit. But he will never envision a scheme that encompasses both oppositions. The question next to ask is whether it was his Academic sources, or whether it was Aristotle himself who did not understand the mathematical meaning of the indeterminate dyad. There is intriguing evidence in Metaphysics M and N for the latter interpretation. It would seem that his sources were in the dark about this too; but whatever one concludes about the Academy, there is evidence that Aristotle had Platos accounts at hand either to quote or to paraphrase, and that he could not make sense of them. In N.1 (1087b7 ff.), Aristotle mentions a group of thinkers who attempt to generate the numbers, o rivmo, from the unequal dyad of the great and small, taken as a material principle in relation to the formal one, and someone else who would generate them from the principle of plurality. (He probably intends, respectively, the followers of Plato and Speusippus.) The generation of numbers does not seem to have been a concern of Platos, however; the problem of multiplicity, or of how things can be both one and many, which when posed by Parmenides might have led his successors to theorise in the abstract about the generating of numbers, seems to be regarded in the Philebus (14c-15a, 16c-17a) as merely a staple of the eristic paradoxes, now subsumed within the premises of Socrates concrete enumerative approach. Which is to say, it appears that Plato is no longer so interested in number theory as he is in simply counting. I am therefore inclined to think that neither the above-mentioned group nor the someone else represents Platos line of argument, or Platos understanding of the unequal dyad. Aristotle bears this out by going on immediately to mention

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an individual who speaks of the one and the unequal dyad as ontological elements (1087b9), thereby distinguishing him from the group who had used them (afterwards, I presume) as formal and material elements in the generation of numbers. Aristotles complaint about this individual is that he does not make the distinction that the unequal dyad of great and small is one thing in formula (lg), but not in number (rivm). Why would not Plato have made this distinction? The unequal dyad is not one thing in formula alone: the successive pairs of interpolated numbers relate uniquely to one object as well, the side of the square that is their single geometric mean. Further, since it consists of successively more equal sides of a single rectangular number, the dyad can quite emphatically and strikingly be said to be of one number, with a rationale that Aristotle might have appreciated if he had been more familiar with the construction. On this model of progressively equalised rectangular numbers, we have a transparent motivation for the original formulation of terms like unequal, indeterminate dyad, greater-and-lesser, and exceeding and exceeded, which nd their way into the theories of Platos followers. In additionand this point would seem to be decisive for the interpretationwe should expect to nd them opposed in this context to a concept of the unit which is associated with the square or equal. On no other grounds but those of the new measurement science, as I have described them here, would such an association be expected. Sure enough, the unit in these theories is described as the equal (1087b5, 1092b1), in such a way as to mystify not only Aristotle but also modern interpreters of these passages. Neither Aristotle nor his Academic sources seem to connect these various expressions with geometrical representations of number; the theories on the generation of numbers betray no inuence of Theaetetus square/oblong distinction, nor of the geometrical interpretation of number that is settled convention by the time of Euclid. The Academics seem to have posited ideal numbers which were generated individually in succession (two, three, four, as

Aristotle says in M.7 1081a23, and so without distinction as to square or oblong) from the unit and the indeterminate dyad. Aristotle takes some pains to make sense of this theory: if the units (monads) of ideal numbers are all the same and addible, then they are not ideal at all, but normal mathematical numbers (cf. 1081a19); but if the monads of each ideal number are distinct and inaddible, they must be generated before each of their respective numbers can be generated, as a point of logic (1081a26 ff.). This is true no matter how these monads are generated; but Aristotle once more quotes he who rst said it ( prto$ epn, 1081a24) again distinguishing him from those who later used such phrases as the unequal dyadto allude to a possible mechanism for this generation of inaddible monads (smblhtoi monde$): they arise out of unequals, once these are equalised (x nswn (sasvntwn gr gnonto)). To begin with, Aristotle cannot rightly make attribution to anyone of a theory on the generation of inaddible monads. As he says, no one actually spoke that way (1081a36). Aristotle, perhaps himself in reaction against the eristic movement, constructs these arguments to save his opponents from the obvious fallacy of ideal numbers composed of normal, identical, addible monads; yet the alternative, unstated by them, but which he says follows reasonably from their own premises, turns out to be impossible as well, if truth be told (1081b1). There is therefore no reason to suppose that Plato thought or said that the generation of inaddible monads, or any monads, was connected with his notion of the unequal. On the contrary; Plato seems to have anticipated Aristotles notion of the unit as a measure, both in the intuitions of the enumerative method and in the specically mathematical context. At 57d-e, the distinction is made in the Philebus between the units of the arithmetic of the many, which change as different things are counted, and those of the arithmetic of the philosophisers, which are always identical. It would of course have been an easy (but pointless) solution to the problem of the irrational to say that incommensurables are simply measured by different unit lengths than commensurables.

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The enumeration of Theaetetus and Plato, on the other hand, is predicated on the assumption of identical units. While some lengths still remain incommensurable on these terms, all the formerly irrational square roots become expressible through an indeterminate dyad, and the achievement of this articulation would be lost without the assumption. What can be attributed to Plato, however, is that his notion of the unequal involved a process of equalizing it. In neither place in M where Aristotle mentions this idea (as above, and at 1083b24) can he make anything of it, nor does it seem to have any intuitive connection to the Academic number-generation theories he covers there. The only conclusion, I suggest, is that Aristotle refers to this conception of the unequal merely because he knows it to have been true of Platos thought. The Platonists speak of the unequal as a generative principle, Aristotle might have reasoned, and who knows what they mean, as to how it generates; Plato himself also spoke of the unequal, and the only action he attributed to it was being equalized; perhaps this was somehow the generating action, as obscure as that seems; one ought therefore to mention what the old man said, in fairness to them. In N, Aristotle for the rst time mentions a number-generation theory which did, perhaps, try to interpret the process; it rst declares that there is no generation of odd numbers at all, and that the even numbers are generated out of the great and small when these are equalised. Aristotles criticism of the logic of this account verges on the sarcastic: fanern ti o to vewrsai neken poiosi tn gnesin tn rivmn. (Clearly, it is not on account of philosophical theorizing that they produce their generation of the numbers. 1091a29) Neither Aristotle, for whom the notion seemed fatuously self-contradictory, nor these latter theorists, for whom it was received dogma, could have known the original mathematical context, for neither could interpret or properly apply the notion that the unequal as an elemental principle involved a process of being equalized. We can now restore the context, in the process of equalizing an unequal, oblong number with an indeterminate dyad of more and more

equal rational factors. (It is particularly striking that these latter Academics seemed to know that the notion unequal-when-it-isequalized served in such a way as to divide all numbers, but they tried, with dismal consequence, to apply it to the familiar, venerable distinction between odd and even; they must have been unaware of the division of numbers by square and oblong, which supplanted the earlier distinction in the course of Theaetetus study of irrational roots, and where alone the notion of the equalized unequal has any use or coherence.) Those who say the unequal is some one thing, making the indeterminate dyad from great and small, say things that are far indeed from being likely or possible, in Aristotles view (M.1, 1088a15). He complains that to adopt such ideas is really to adopt his lowly Category of the relative as a substantial, unitary rst principle. Something is great or small only in relation to something else. Unlike the superior Categories of quality and quantity, which have more substance because they involve absolute change, whether by alteration or increase, there is no such change proper to the Category of the relative. While a compared term may remain substantially the same, it becomes greater or less merely by quantitative change in the other term. Aristotle is therefore at a loss as to why such metaphysical honour should be paid to concepts that are inherently relative. Plato could have replied: Consider the nature of measurement toward the generation of the mean. In this process, the relative terms do not depend simply on each other, but both are related to an unchanging third thing, a single geometric mean. Furthermore, the pairs of relative terms are uniquely related to their proper mean, the root of a particular oblong number. And because the greater and lesser lengths approach closer than any given difference to the unchanging length of the root, their status in relation to this length, qua members of an innite succession of approximating pairs, poses a heady puzzle for any common-sense idea of their ontological difference from, or identity with, this single length. There is therefore every reason to see the indeterminate dyad of great and small, a self-

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correcting binary approximation of a single geometric mean, as a unitary and substantial thing in its proper mathematical context. But if the context was lost, and one had access only to the words in its name, then Aristotles objections might seem judicious. That Aristotle knew about the geometry of means is clear enough, but he must not have been familiar with the interpolation of means in the peculiar conguration of the indeterminate dyad, where means become extremes, which in turn beget means, which then in turn become extremes, while each pair of harmonic and arithmetic means serves as the extremes to the geometric mean in the middle. The notion of relativity embodied in this conguration, involving a process of equalising, and motion towards a xed object, is more subtle and peculiar than that involved in a simple comparison, or even a static analysis expressed in terms of a mean and extremes. I claim it is this peculiar conception of the relative that Plato raised to the level of a principle, to stand in tandem with the absolute measure connoted by the unit. While the Academic metaphysicians may appear to have used these very same principles, right down to the letter of their formulation, it is clear that neither they nor Aristotle grasped their proper function. They have nothing to do with accounting for multiplicity in the universe, or with the generation of numbers. They have everything to do with the measurement of numbers. After Theaetetus, numbers are gured as square or rectangular; they can be compared not only in quantity, but in size, by the length of their square roots, just as after Euclids II.14, any rectilinear gures can be compared by the sides of their equivalent squares. While all numbers have either absolutely or relatively measurable rootlengths, not all lengths have countable squares. This is one of the odd new ways that arithmetic and geometry, number and magnitude, become interlinked after Theaetetus happy reformulation. It is therefore in this context, the context of measurement, that Plato is likely to have distinguished the absolute from the relative, being-in-itself from relative being. Aristotle alludes to just such a distinction, in a passage which once again exemplies his peculiar

mire: he wants to review the Academic theories on the generation of multiplicity based on certain contrary principles, including principles rst conceived by Plato, but conceived in a context where in some cases they werent even contraries, and where they had had nothing to do with generating either multiplicity or numbers; he knows the language of Platos own articulation of these principles, but doesnt have the mathematics to interpret the words. In this case, he may even foist his own innovations in usage back on to Platos original phrases, just to make sense of them. At 1089b16, Aristotle once again invokes he who says these things, claiming this time that this person had also proved for himself (prosapefnato) that that which was potentially a this and substance (t dunmei tde ka osa) was not existent in itself (n kav at); it was the relative (t pr$ ti). What the expression potentially a this and substance may have meant for Plato is a difcult thing to determine. In particular, Aristotle seems to take dunmei, with obvious anachronism, in his own characteristic sense of potentially; he had just now used the word this way when introducing part of his own familiar solution to ontological analysis, that we must hypothesize in each case what a thing is potentially (ngkh mn oun...povenai t dunmei n kst, 1089b15-16). Perhaps Aristotle is here weaving his own terminology into the Platonic materials? But his next comment is a scholium, on Platos appropriation of the term relative, that it is just as if he had said quality (sper e epe t poin); and there was never a scholium without a text. So what could the Greek text t dunmei tde ka osa have meant to Plato? Recall Knorrs observation that dnami$ and dunmei mean square and in square throughout Greek mathematical literature. (The only exception is the very passage in the Theaetetus [148a] where the eponymous hero applies the term dnami$, for the rst time, to a square root.) Thus in Platos context, the same words may well have signied that which has particularity and existence in squarei.e., that which is countable (because it is commensurable) only in square (dunmei), like

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the expressible as against the rational lines. It is these very magnitudes which one could expect to nd distinguished as relative in their being, insofar as their being depends on their measure; the rational lengths, on the other hand, have the self-subsistent being of denite quantity, in length and in square, while the irrational lines, which cannot be made commensurable in either length or square, are captive to the realm of ux and non-being. If Plato equated that which has being with that which can be countedand his enumerative method suggests a move in this directionthen it is entirely and specically appropriate that that which has being in square be allowed only a relative existence. It has no autonomous number, but only a relative count. Even the phrase pr$ ti may have had a specic connotation for Plato, which is lost in the anachronistic aura of the Categories; for such beings are measured by a process that is inherently pr$ ti, towards something, measurement toward the generation of the mean. Platos distinction would have been between that which exists or is measured on its own terms (t n kav at)the equal, the square, and rational lengthsand that which exists or is measured toward something else (t n pr$ ti), the unequal being equalized, the rectangle approaching the square, and the indeterminate dyad approximating the mean. It seems clear that any such signicance in these phrases could never have been allowed to emerge through the schemata of Aristotles redaction. He explains (1089b4 ff.) that in response to the diversion caused by Parmenides, the philosophers posited the relative and the unequal as the types of opposed principle which, when mated with being and the unit, generated a manifold reality. He points out, however, that neither of these posited principles is in fact the contrary (nanton) or the negation (pfasi$) of being and unity; each is rather another single nature among the things that exist (ma fusi$ tn ntwn). This is also the point of his critical scholium on Platos use of the phrase pr$ ti: the Category relative is no more a legitimate candidate than the Category quality for that contrary and negation of being and the unit which

the Academics were supposed to be seeking; each is simply some one of the beings (n ti tn ntwn, 1089b20). He goes on to complain that if Plato had meant to explain how things in general are many, he shouldnt have conned his investigation to things that lie in the same Category (whether this be substance or quality or quantity, let alone the insubstantial relative). The sense of this reading ranges from the misguided to the wilfully obtuse. In the rst instance, we cannot fault Plato for failing either to prophesy or to apply the revolutionary insights into ontology expressed in Aristotles theory of the Categories. Nor can we fault him for not being interested any longer, as indeed he wasnt, in the problem of how things are many. Still less can we fault him for giving up the reasoning by opposites. He would of course have agreed that his conception of the relative, in the conguration of the indeterminate dyad, is in no sense the opposite of the unit and its measure, but simply a different way of measuring, based also on the unit, that applies to certain types of being (i.e., certain two-dimensional numbers and one-dimensional magnitudes oblongs and their roots). But the full picture of Aristotles plight as a redactor emerges when one throws in the fact that Platos complete formulation did in fact include a genuine opposition as well, between the unit and the greater-and-less qua greater and less. One then has a recipe for the peculiar quandary of Metaphysics M and N towards Platonic thought, based in part on unwitting conations, but in part also on agrant, self-serving anachronisms, and characterised by a haplessness in the face of Platos own expressions, when read in light of their borrowed use in the irrelevant theories of the Academy. A question remains: where did Aristotle get those texts of Plato, which he seems to treat as quoted material? Although the distinction between absolute and relative being may be consistent with the Philebus and with other ontological discussions in the later Plato, the specic phrases which Aristotle comments on, such as t dunmei tde ka osa, do not seem to occur in the dialogues. Where, then, did Plato draw this mathematical distinction, and to

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what did he apply it? Was it perhaps in a Lecture on The Gooda lecture which seemed to promise moral philosophy, but delivered mathematicsa lecture which nobody understood?

assigning the medial line to geometry, the binomial to arithmetic, and the apotome to harmony, as is stated by Eudemus, the Peripatetic.32

The mathematical development of ancient measurement science will prove much easier to trace than its philosophical obfuscation at the hands of Academics and Peripatetics. As forbidding as the structure of Euclids Elements X seems to be, I believe its logic is profoundly simple, following directly in the spirit of Platos enumerative method, and upon Theaetetus geometrical interpretation of number. After Theaetetus rst efforts had rendered all the square roots countable, he next sought to extend his classicatory net even further into the uncharted regions of the irrational. He could use his already successful methods as a paradigm: since exploring numbers in terms of the means between them had yielded the class of expressible lines, he was led to explore the possibility of means between the expressible lengths themselves, and the possibility of irrational means. While in general such means could not be counted off, since the expressible lengths, treated as extremes, had not the xed values necessary for a computation of means, the mean lengths could still be constructed and named with respect to rational lengths; just as at the time of the Meno, the root length of the double square could not as yet be counted, but it could be constructed within the unit square and was named diameter (or the through-measure) by the professors (Meno 85b). Orders of irrationals could thus be dened in terms of means, though they could not be made commensurable. Just such an assignment of orders is credited to Theaetetus by Pappus, in his commentary on Elements X, on the authority of Eudemus history of mathematics (now lost):
...it was...Theaetetus...who divided the more generally known irrational lines according to the different means,

The passage does not suggest that Theaetetus invented the three lines and their names, but only that he rst saw the essential parallelism between the structure of their relations and those of the familiar means. The medial simply is the geometric mean between two expressible lengths. That is why it is called mso$, the mean proportional; the name medial serves only to distinguish it in English. The binomial is a sum of two expressible lengths, and so can be associated with the arithmetic mean, which is half the sum of two rational lengths; but the apotome is merely a difference of expressible lengths, and the connection with the harmonic mean is less obvious. This also comes clear, however, as one recalls the fundamental feature of pairs of arithmetic and harmonic means which makes possible the measurement by an indeterminate dyad: if one applies a rectangle contained by rational extremes to the length of their arithmetic mean, the height of the new rectangle turns out to be the length of their harmonic mean. Euclids X.112-14 illustrate a signicantly parallel property of binomials and apotomes: if one were to apply the same rational rectangle to a length that was known to be a binomial, the height would turn out to be an apotome; further, and curiously enough, the expressible terms of such a binomial and an apotome would be commensurable with each other, and in the same ratio. If Theaetetus was responsible for these propositions, he might well have been led to view the binomial and apotome as irrational means between rational extremes, or as irrational factors of an oblong number, counterparts to the rational arithmetic and harmonic means. It is clear, however, that Euclids presentation is not designed as a theory of means. The bulk of his 115 propositions in Book X are concerned with enumerating and constructing twelve different kinds of binomial and apotome, making with the medial thirteen types of irrational line; the full list is given by Euclid after Prop.

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111, before the proofs that establish the analogy between the binomials and apotomes, and the arithmetic and harmonic means. The rationale for this enumeration becomes more apparent if one considers David Fowlers handy grouping of the propositions:
X1-18: general properties of expressible lines and rectangles, X19-26: medial lines and rectangles, X27-35: constructions underlying binomials and apotomes, X36-41, 42-7, 48-53, 54-9, 60-5, 66-70, & 71-2: blocks of propositions dealing with each of the six types of additive irrational lines. They are described in X3641 and also, in a different geometrical conguration, in the Second Denitions following X47, X73-8, 79-84, 85-90, 91-6, 97-102, 103-7, & 108-10: blocks of propositions, parallel to the previous, dealing with each of the six types of subtractive irrational lines. They are described in X73-8 and also, in a different geometrical conguration, in the Third Denitions following X84, X111-14: the relations between binomials and apotomes, X115: medials of medials...

As Fowler himself observes, the propositions seem to represent an exploration of the simplest operations of adding, subtracting, and squaring pairs of expressibles. Before Theaetetus classied them in relation to the different rational means, the binomial and apotome may have rst been distinguished and dened as part of an investigation of the arithmetic of expressible lengths. An investigator might have said, if we are to understand the expressibles the way we understand numbersand indeed, numbers are the very paradigms of our understandingthen we must comprehend their arithmetic; what might the manipulations of arithmetic look like when applied

to expressible lines? Whereas the prospect of such an investigation might have daunted the most optimistic of researchers, with its seeming openendedness and unlimited number of possible cases, Euclid was able, by manipulating squares and rectangles, to organize the innite additions and subtractions of expressible lengths into six types each. Thus Euclid accomplished the rst ever rigorous ordering of radically incommensurable lengths, as the sums and differences of expressible ones. One cannot measure these sums and differences as such, and so one cannot count off the irrational lines that are produced; but one can number their types, and enumerate their orders. While the fundamental early propositions of Book X are generally credited to Theaetetus, and the propositions about mean proportionals (medials) seem to suit his historical and mathematical character, the enumeration of the binomials and apotomes must belong to Euclid. Pappus says that Euclid, following Theaetetus, determined...many orders of the irrationals; and brought to light, nally, whatever of nitude (or deniteness) is to be found in them. This should naturally refer to his ordering of possible binomials and apotomes, and the enumeration of six corresponding types. Though they do not depend on the proofs involved in Euclids enumeration, Theaetetus propositions, about the relations between binomials and apotomes, are then placed by Euclid at the end of Book X, so that they can be expressed in terms of that enumeration, and take on a new authority: each pair belongs to one of six sets of ordered pairs of binomials and apotomes whose terms turn out to be commensurable and in the same ratio; each pair consists of corresponding members of one of a nite number of possible combinations of additive and subtractive expressible lengths. It is possible, then, to trace the genesis of Book X in this way: Theaetetus rst extended the insights of measurement toward the generation of the mean by using the three means involved in that science as heuristic paradigms with which to interpret irrational magnitudes. Just as an expressible length is a geometric mean

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between rational extremes, a medial length is a mean proportional between expressible extremes; and just as arithmetic and harmonic means are pairs of commensurable rational factors of the rectangle contained by the extremes of their interval, binomials and apotomes are pairs of irrational factors of the same rectangle. In his investigation of binomials and apotomes, Euclid discovered their classication, and thereby produced an ordering of irrationals in terms of possible types of sum and differencean arithmetic of expressible lines. This in turn advanced the classicatory scope of Theaetetus propositions on the relations between binomials and apotomes, when they were placed after Euclids work, at the end of Book X. While Theaetetus could likely have proved that a rational area applied to a binomial produces an apotome as breadth, and that the terms of these irrational factors are commensurable and in the same ratio, Euclid could now add, as he does in the enunciations of Propositions 112 and 113, that such a binomial and an apotome belong to the same order. David Fowler approaches the book from a very different angle, as part of his reconstruction of the ancient mathematics of nvufaresi$. He proposes an anthyphairetic theory of ratio, where ratios between quantities are described by counting the number of mutual subtractions which can occur between them: one counts the number of times the lesser subtracts from the greater, then the number of times the remainder can be taken away from the lesser, then the remainder of that transaction from the former remainder, and so on; the list of numbers thus produced gives a unique description of the particular ratio. He nds evidence for the historical existence of this approach in several quarters, including a direct allusion in Aristotles Topics to a denition of same ratio as same antanairesis ; and he sees the peculiar implications of this ratio theory as providing the most economical of many proposed rationales for the total sequence and layout of Euclids Book II. The most surprising fact he uncovers is a remarkable periodicity that arises in the anthyphairetic description of ratios of the form m: nthat is, ratios of expressible lines.

The achievement of Fowlers work is to have rediscovered, and in some measure to have resurrected in our day, the other branch of measurement science, measurement pr$ llhla. The periodic repetition of the terms in the otherwise innite mutual subtraction of expressible quantities would have been the great discovery of this science; as Fowler observes:
Those ratios that can be now completely understood and described in nite terms by the arithmoi include the ratios of the sides of commensurable squares, that is the ratios of expressible lines m: n...

Note how tly this parallels the development I have described in the science of measurement toward the generation of the mean: those lengths which can now be uniquely measured in terms of the rivmo include these same expressible lines, the sides of commensurable squares. As far as the rationale for Euclids Book X is concerned, however, Fowlers reconstruction of the mathematics of anthyphairesis shows only why the relations between expressible lines would have seemed a thing worth investigating. We gain no insight into the specic form of the book as we have it, into its method and structure in the classication of the irrationals; these are better explained as an integral outgrowth of the new science proposed in Platos Politicus, the science of measurement toward the generation of the mean. This is not just because Theaetetus is said to have classied the irrationals in terms of the different means. Consider that the entire investigative strategy of Book X, including the work I have ascribed to Euclid, is to manipulate squares and rectangles, a manipulation in two dimensions, in such a way as to distinguish and to enumerate the forms of the associated lines. This approach was born with the science of measurement toward the mean, on one fateful day. As he lies dying off-stage, the story is told of how the young

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Theaetetus, Theodorus student, on the day of Socrates appearance in court, divided all numbers between the square and the oblong, and distinguished two kinds of line as the sides of squares equal to each kind of number. The square side of an oblong number is the geometric mean between the sides of the oblong. The names Theaetetus chose for these two lengths, mko$ and dnami$, did not survive, for the implications of a classication by sides of squares made the distinction itself obsolete: both kinds of length would now be called @ht, expressible. But the technique applied in his classication was to direct the exploration of lines to its crowning achievement, in the enumerations of Euclids Book X. We ought, however late, to acknowledge the dramatist who saw the signicance of such a day for history, saw it in a way that must combine the personal and the universal, the historical and the mathematical. Innovations in mathematics must have moved that man in a way that made even innovation in religion seem a distant charge, a memory of youthful import. We must come to recognise the changes in this chronicler of the human argument, as he took his bearings anew, and found new patterns, enumerative structures, emerging in a discourse that strains to keep paceparadigms of order no longer laid up in heaven, yet resonant, perhaps, with a piece of divinity. His myth of the globes reversal (Politicus 268d-274e) encompasses a deteriorating world, but also a return, through the numbering of its classes and kinds, to the elegance of gods tenure. Let him stand absolved at last of the mystications of his followers: Platos own measures, his own mysteries, must nally furnish our count.

2. Wilbur R. Knorr and Miles F. Burnyeat, Methodology, Philology, and

Philosophy, Isis, 1979, 70:565-70

3. Miles Burnyeat, The Philosophical Sense of Theaetetus Mathematics,

Isis, 1978, 69:489-513, on pg. 513, pg. 513

4. Knorr, Evolution, pg. 192 5. Ibid., pg. 192 6. Ibid., pg. 69 ff. 7. Ibid., pg. 96 (In full: (a) The proofs are demonstrably valid. (b) The
treatment by special cases and the stopping at 17 are necessitated by the methods of proof employed. (c) The proofs will be understood to apply to an innite number of cases. (d) No use may be made of the dichotomy of square and oblong numbers in Theodorus studies, either in the demonstrations or in the choice of cases to be treated. (e) Theodorus proofs utilize the special relations of the lines in the construction of the dynameis. The geometrical methods of construction are of the type characteristic of metrical geometry as developed in Elements II and are closely associated with a certain early style of arithmetic theory. (f) But the arithmetic methods by which Theaetetus could prove the two general theorems, on the incommensurability of lines associated with non-square and non-cubic integers, were not available to Theodorus.

8. Malcolm Brown, Theaetetus: Knowledge as Continued Learning,

Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1969, 7:359-79, on pgs. 3678

9. Knorr, Evolution, pg. 158 10. This proof is given by Knorr, Evolution, pg. 184 11. Ibid., pg. 159 12. see Euclids Elements X Def. 3 13. see Platos Politicus, 278b-e 14. see Euclid, The Elements, 3 vols., Vol. 3, ed. Sir Thomas Heath
(Annapolis: St. Johns College Press, 1947), pg. 3

NOTES:

1. Wilbur R. Knorr, Evolution of the Euclidean Elements

(Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1975), pgs. 65-9

15. see Euclid II.14 and VI.13

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16. Brown, Theaetetus, pg. 371 ff. 17. Proclus, In Platonis Timaeum Commentaria, 3 vols., Vol. 2, ed. Ernst Diehl (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903-6), pgs. 173-4
18. Brown, Theaetetus, pg. 371

19. see David H. Fowler, The Mathematics of Platos Academy

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pg. 14 ff.

20. see Platos Timaeus 36a for this usage 21. The reading of B and T; editors usually read to )to 22. Brown, Theaetetus, pgs. 376-7 23. Ibid., pg. 377 24. see Theaetetus, 185c 25. Brown, Theaetetus, pg. 374 26. quoted in Brown, Theaetetus, pg. 373, note 38 27. Euclid, X.1 28. Brown, Theaetetus, pg. 379 29. Julia Annas, Aristotles Metaphysics Books M and N, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1976, pg. 195

30. Ibid. 31. Knorr, Evolution, pgs. 65-9 32. tr. W.Thomson and G.Junge, in Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 301 33. Fowler, Mathematics, pgs. 169-70 34. Ibid., pg. 192 35. tr. Thomson and Junge, in Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 301 36. Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 17 ff., and see Aristotle, Topics 158b 37. Ibid., pg. 192 38. see Ibid., pgs. 190-1

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Moral Reform in Measure for Measure

Laurence Berns (St. Johns College, Annapolis)
To what extent are the principles of classical political philosophy and the American polity reconcilable? The Declaration of Independence did not mean, Lincoln tells us, that all men are equal in all respects. The Declaration, however, presupposes that the difference between man and man is never as great as the difference between man and beast, on the one hand, and man and God, on the other. This equality by superiority to beasts and inferiority to the divine sets limits both to human servitude and to human sovereignty.1 These principles issue in the rule of prudence that just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed. This equality, as Locke put it, in respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion one over another is not incompatible with the classical principle of fundamental inequalities in capacities to govern. As a matter of fact the institution of free elections (the Declarations Right to Representation) introducing a principle of merit into the system is predicated on the existence of such inequalities of ability, and the capacities of electors roughly to discern them. (This does not, of course, mean that the judgment of the electors is always correct, but that it is sufciently deliberate and well-informed to avoid disasters that would unhinge the very frame of government.) The classical position on democracy has been put, I believe, with great clarity by Thomas Aquinas quoting St. Augustine:
If the people have a sense of moderation and responsibility and are most careful guardians of the common weal, it is their right to enact a law allowing such a people to choose their own magistrates for the government
Delivered at the Convention of the American Political Science Association, September 1993, The Washington Hilton Hotel, Washington, D.C.

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of the commonwealth. But if, as time goes on, the same people become so corrupt as to sell their votes and entrust the government to scoundrels and criminals, then the right of appointing their public ofcials is rightly forfeit to such a people, and the choice devolves to a few good men. [S.T., I-II, Q. 97, A. 1.]

I have no problem with this statement in principle, despite the questionable practicality of its remedy for corruption. As Benjamin Franklin put it, If any form of government is capable of making a nation happy, ours I think bids fair now for producing that effect. But, after all, much depends on the people to be governed. We have been guarding against an evil that old States are most liable to, excess of power in the rulers; but our present danger seems to be defect of obedience in the subjects. There is hope, however, from the enlightened state of this age and country, we may guard effectually against that evil as well as the rest. [Lett. to Ch. Carroll, 5/29/1789] What most threatens the required state of enlightenment today, it seems to me is not any paucity of economic resources devoted to education, but rather the reigning generally accepted opinions about what constitutes enlightenment. The AugustineThomas statement suggests, at the very least, that there is a natural connection between the will to preserve free institutions and the sense that those living in accordance with them are worthy of them. How can a corrupt people be reformed? This, of course, is the problem set for its protagonists by Shakespeares Measure for Measure. Some distinctions between Duke Vincentios situation and ours must be made. He has a single city and its environs to reform, we have a huge and highly diversied nation. Our laws derive their constitutional authority from the very people needing reform, his do not. His polity is monarchical, ours is not. Our polity contains a diversity of religious sects, his does not. Religious authority and moral authority, if not united, form a well-functioning team in his regime, in ours ... they do and they dont. Obviously we are not likely to nd immediately applicable recipes from a study of

Measure for Measure. We are obliged to put things in constitutional terms: the abuse of the rst Amendment; the tendency of lawyers and judges to ape intellectual fashions, sanctioning licentiousness with shallow-pate notions like freedom of expression, bargain-basement moral autonomy.2 We can, as teachers, try to change the intellectual fashions. The only way I know how to do that is to try to rise beyond the realm of intellectual fashion altogether, by trying to understand the Dukes problem as much as possible, as my better, William Shakespeare, understood it. Vienna, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, is ruled by a Duke, who above all other strifes contended especially to know himself,... a gentleman of all temperance. Like those two political defectives, Prospero and Socrates, he has no taste whatsoever for the theatrical pomposity endemic to political life. His apolitical temperament has caused him wrongly (twas my fault) to allow Viennas strict and biting laws to become toothless and contemptible; licentiousness thrives, and Liberty plucks Justice by the nose. His keen sense of justice prevents him from punishing in his own name evil deeds bred by his own permissiveness. But purication there must be. He appoints a Lord Angelo (soon to prove a Fallen Angelo), a man of stricture and rm abstinence, who scarce confesses that his blood ows to stand in for himself, that is (unlike American executives) to enforce or qualify the laws. But rst something should be said about why someone like puritanical Angelo was needed. The Vienna presented at rst in the play seems to consist primarily of nunneries, monasteries and whorehouses, with almost nothing in between: the only family man presented is the absurd comic gure Elbow; austere celibacy, on the one hand, and saucy proigacy, on the other, again almost nothing in between. As sexuality is debased, celibacy, for some, gains in attractiveness. Something seems to be radically wrong with the way most Viennese think, feel and behave in regard to their sexuality. Immediately fol-

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lowing Angelos appointment the Duke pretends that affairs of state require his hasty removal to foreign parts; Angelo is on his own. Political scientists (Bloom and Jaffa) quite properly refer to Machiavellis The Prince, chapter VII, as the locus classicus for the Dukes mode of procedure with Angelo.3 Cesare Borgia on taking over Romagna found that because it had been very badly governed it was full of robberies, quarrels and insolence. To reduce it to peace and obedience he appointed a very cruel man, Remirro de Orco, as his deputy with full powers. Remirro soon reduced it to peace and unity. The reform being accomplished, in order to deect the hatred it had generated from himself Cesare had the cruel Remirro placed one morning in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces, a piece of wood and a bloody knife beside him. The ferocity of the spectacle left the people both satised and stupied. Bacon speaks of this way of proceeding both in his Wisdom of the Ancients [III], and his Essays [XIII], but both seem to have been published after this play was rst presented. One is tempted to go along with our scientic fashions and play at being more hard-nosed than Thou, but the differences between Shakespeare and Machiavelli at least deserve listing. The Duke does not kill Angelo, though he had full warrant to do so; unlike Cesare with Remirro, the Duke is not interested merely in using Angelo, but also as with everyone else, including himself, making him better, reforming him; above all, since he is not omniscient, he is interested in understanding Angelo: Hence shall we see, /If power change purpose, what our seemers be. It is not simply because he courts popularity, that he doesnt institute the reform himself, it is rather because he is not the right man for the job, and it would not be, or at least not seem, just for him to do so. There is another work of Machiavellis that bears close comparison with Measure for Measure, that is Mandragola4; the Duke seems to combine characteristics of both Ligurio and Frate Timoteo, but here again the differences should prove instructive. The Duke does not leave Vienna, he goes underground in the guise of a holy friar both to observe and invisibly to correct the course of his reform. Angelo evidently goes to work immediately:

the houses of prostitution are put down, and a young gentleman named Claudio is sentenced to death for fornication; for the woman he is engaged to marry (the marriage delayed by dowry problems), Juliet, is big with child. Angelo rejects the urgings of his second in command and his Provost that here the punishment is way out of proportion to the crime. Claudio has a high-spirited sister, Isabella, who has entered the austere order of St. Clare -When you have vowd, you must not speak with men /But in the presence of the prioress; /Then, if you speak, you must not show your face; /Or if you show your face, you must not speak- as a novice. She wishes for an even more strict restraint. We are, I suppose, to imagine her quite beautiful; her moral beauty at least engages the affections of the plays two main protagonists. She is urged by the dissolute gentleman Lucio to plead with Angelo for her brothers life. Despite her choosing to renounce family life, hers is the only powerful display of family feeling in the play. While hearing her plea the transforming event of the play takes place, Angelo nds himself possessed by an overwhelming passion, which, both to himself and to her, he calls love for Isabella. He, on second interview, proposes that she yield her body to him for one night in exchange for her brothers life. The critique of Angelo would seem to be a critique of Puritanism in general. Licentious Lucio thinks Angelo a man whose blood /Is very snow-broth; one who never feels /The wanton stings and motions of the sense... This is surely wrong. The Duke had made a similar, but more penetrating, observation: Lord Angelo is precise; /Stands at a guard with Envy; scarce confesses /That his blood ows... If he must guard against envy, he feels the desires whose indulgences he must not be envious of. With old Escalus, before he has fallen, Angelo admits that he too has had the desires that lead to the actions he is punishing with death, acting upon them makes the difference. He is too good, at least too strict and too proud to consort with the dissolute; he proves to be not good enough to be celibate. He wants to be associated with the highly virtuous, is attracted by Isabellas purity; he wants to pre-

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serve the image of his gravity; and he wants the joys of what he calls love: your brother shall not die Isabel, if you give me love. He seems to be altogether confused about the difference between yielding up thy body and give me love.5 It was Isabellas moving persuasiveness that led him to give more attention to the erotic side of his soul than he could handle: Go to your bosom, /Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know /Thats like my brothers fault. If it confess /A natural guiltiness, such as his.... He replies to himself: She speaks, and tis such sense /That my sense breeds with it. [2.2.137 ff.] He did warn the Duke: Let there be some more test made of my metal, /Before so noble and so great a gure /Be stampd upon it. The Duke knows that: He doth with holy abstinence subdue /That in himself which he spurs on his power /To qualify in others. [4.2.79] The immoderate Puritan allows the bitterness from his own frustrated desires with perhaps a touch of envy to spur him on to punish those who will not abstain. The fear of falling into temptation increases the severity. The intensity of purifying zeal seems to be directly proportional to the difculty one has in keeping ones own illicit desires under control. The judgment is warped in the direction of severity by what one feels is required to frighten oneself into abstinence. Isabellas loveliness and what he sees when he follows her advice and looks into his own soul push him over the edge.
And now I give my sensual race the rein: Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite; Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes That banish what they sue for. [2.4.159 ff.]

mon crammed with Stoic commonplaces on the worthlessness of life. From here on the Duke uses the holy privileges associated with his disguise to inform himself of everyone elses secrets. He overhears Isabellas account to Claudio of Angelos proposal. In another remarkable scene Claudio begins by sharing Isabellas righteous, honorable and Christian indignation at the impossibility of Angelos plan. But he has been brought to face the fear of death in a very feeling way.
Death is a fearful thing. ...to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bath in ery oods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprisond in the viewless winds And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world: or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling, -tis too horrible. The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death. [3.1.115 ff.]

On reection it might not seem so strange that modesty should provoke desire. Any competent political scientist can gure out why Angelo never intends to fulll his side of the bargain. Isabella can nd no charity in sin. More than our brother is our chastity. The Duke disguised as Friar Lodowick prepares Claudio for death with a ser-

Claudios speech is a beautiful illustration of that very illusion of the imagination beautifully described by Adam Smith: the way a man or womans sympathetic imagination attributes to the dead what he or she would feel being alive, if he or she were housed in the dead persons body. And thus the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and ... the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive. The Duke certainly does not explain anything like this to Claudio or to anyone else in this play,

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but I dont think he would disagree with the way Smith closes this chapter. And from thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness, but the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which, while it aficts and morties the individual, guards and protects the society. [The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.1.13] Bloom quite properly refers to Lucretius [III. 417 ff.] in his discussion of this passage, but Smith, it seems to me, is more balanced, even more classical. Claudio goes on to plead:
Sweet sister, let me live. What sin you do to save a brothers life, Nature dispenses with the deed so far That it becomes a virtue. [3.1.132 ff.]

again] From thine own sisters shame? ...Take my deance, Die, perish! [3.1.135 ff.]

This is not the rst time sexual imagery enters Isabellas speech in moments of great passion. Answering Angelo she is primarily thinking of stripping herself for whipping:
Thimpression of keen whips Id wear as rubies, And strip myself to death as to a bed That longing have been sick for, ere Id yield My body up to shame. [2.4.101 ff.]

This is not the rst time Nature has been invoked to oppose chastity law. The licentious but eloquent Lucio puts it in a way that comes close to generally accepted opinion among our intellectuals.
Your brother and his lover have embracd; As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time That from the seedness the bare fallow brings To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry. [1.4.40 ff.]

The licentious have their say in this play. But Shakespeare has quite naturally, but not altogether explicitly, built Natures answer to promiscuity into their very speech: it is full of the imagery and fear of venereal disease. The Duke seems to have come to the realization that Nature in human society requires law for its fulllment.6 Isabella is moved by Claudios speech, but in exactly the opposite direction. O, you beast. . . faithless coward...dishonest wretch, she replies.
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? Ist not a kind of incest, to take life [i.e., to be born

The Dukes rst task is to avert the great impending injustice brought on by his scheme, but he does it in a way that also seems to be perfectly calculated to bring Isabella to face her sexuality, and human sexuality in general, more temperately. His reform will turn out to be a comprehensive reform; all the representative characters, Pompey, Lucio, Claudio, Angelo and Isabella are in different ways reformed. The Duke uses the religious authority he has assumed to engage Isabella in a plot that will right all wrongs. Angelo, it turns out, had been engaged to marry a lady, Mariana. When her brother carrying her dowry was wrecked at sea, Angelo pretending in her disoveries of dishonour called off the marriage. This wronged lady, the forenamed maid has unreasonably been driven by his unkindnesses to a more violent and unruly love for Angelo. She still regards him as her husband. Isabella is to agree to Angelos terms, arrange for a short meeting in a very dark place; Mariana is to be substituted for Isabella. If the encounter is acknowledged afterwards, it may compel him to her recompense. By this, the Duke argues, is your brother saved, your honour untainted, the poor Mariana advantaged, and the corrupt deputy scaled. The Duke as friar will frame and make Mariana t for the attempt. The fact that this seems to pose no special difculty suggests that Mariana may indeed be as right as one can be to mate with Angelo. But it is too

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easy these days to berate Puritanism, Mariana may just see some nobility in Angelos austerity, a nobility that manifests itself to us as well even in his guilty self-condemnations. It can hardly escape Isabellas later reection that what takes place between Angelo and Mariana is in many respects parallel to what took place between Claudio and Juliet. But this conjunction is sanctioned by a holy man, who declares that the doubleness of the benet defends the deceit from reproof. Isabella is happy to go along. Even the pleasure of revenge on Angelo seems to be sanctioned by this holy man. Isabellas imagination is invited with no impiety to receive scenes of her enemy coupled with his afanced lover, thinking he is violating herself. If her soul is puritanical, it will have to become Puritanism with a certain sense of humor.7 The Dukes plan for deceiving Angelo succeeds, but Angelo sends no reprieve for Claudio. On the contrary, he advances the time for his beheading. He has no interest in preserving the life of a man privy to his crime, and who, if he has the least grain of honor, would be bound to think of little else than revenge. The Duke, again using his assumed religious authority, attempts to get the Provost of the prison to substitute the head of a convicted murderer, Barnardine, for Claudios, to fool the wicked Angelo again. The Duke had invoked the vow of my order. The gentle Provost is the only one who refuses to bow to religious authority, Pardon me, good father, it is against my oath. When the Duke, without fully revealing himself, is forced to prove he is acting not only by religious authority but by the authority of the Duke himself, the Provost goes along. He who refused to subordinate political authority to religious authority for his care and secrecy will be rewarded by the Duke with worthier place. But Barnardine has been drinking and is not prepared for death today. He simply will not consent to die today. This is an amazing prison. They all agree that to take him in this condition is damnable. Luckily, the captive pirate, Ragozine, who resembles Claudio, has died that morning: the perfect head to substitute for Claudios. Besides provision of some ne comedy, the prison scenes are essential for understanding

the Dukes basic strategy of reform. Pompey the procurer now put out of work becomes the prisons executioners assistant. The servant of false love, venereal disease and the unlawful begetting of life quite easily becomes the true servant of its lawful taking. Pompeys coarseness is re-formed to serve the rule of law. The taking and the begetting of life have been connected before. Angelo declares:
Ha? Fie, these lthy vices! It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stolen A man already made [a murderer], as to remit Their saucy sweetness that do coin heavens image In stamps that are forbid. Tis all as easy Falsely to take away a life true made, As to put mettle [metal] in restrained means To make a false one. [2.4.42 ff.]

As Jaffa put it, Fornication, as a kind of false coinage of citizens, becomes more than a private action.8 The regulation of coinage, societys circulating medium, is usually a rather unquestioned prerogative of sovereignty. The penalties for counterfeiting have never been light. To coin heavens image joins biblical sanctity of begetting to the need for sovereign political regulation of that private behavior which is the source of life for society as a whole.9 (The coining image occurs at least three more times in the play, in speeches by the Duke [1.1.35-36], Isabella [2.4.128-29] and Angelo [1.1.48-50].) Threats of death color the whole atmosphere of the play. Fear of death in potential malefactors seems to be indispensable for the restoration and maintenance of law-abidingness. But absolutely no one ever gets killed in this prison. It is the genius of this Duke to be able to employ the fear without ever having to follow through with the act. The ploy would never work, if it became generally known. The great nal act and scene of the play pulls all strands together, the return of the Duke and resumption of his authority in a grand public ceremony, where the Duke like power divine reveals all hidden iniquities and resolves all difculties with perfect justice.

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This justice, both legal and natural justice, is primarily justice in marriage. For the chaste sexuality of marriage, the raising and nourishing of families under the law, is the solution for the sexual corruption of Vienna.10 The dissolute gentleman, Lucio, is forced to marry the prostitute who is the mother of his child. Angelo, who sought Isabella, who was too good for him, is ordered to marry and love the less scrupulous Mariana. But the Duke knows that the institution of marriage, upon which the health of his polity depends, will not be on a rm foundation unless it shines forth at the paradigmatic center of society. He too must marry, and marry well. The high-minded Duke asks the high-minded Isabella to be his wife. How that works out, we never learn. As part of the apocalypse the Duke staged for his triumphal return, Isabella was made to believe that her brother had indeed been executed. It may be that the Duke wanted her to weigh the events leading to that result more carefully, or merely, as he said, to keep her ignorant of her good,/To make her heavenly comforts of despair/When it is least expected. He might be made to pay for those hours of despair. These reservations aside, it seems to be a near perfect marriage. If it should be that the Duke comes short of perfection by contemplative leniency and Isabella by spirited severity, it would be by the blending of their virtues and the mitigating of their defects in their shared lives or in their offspring that Vienna could hope to receive its perfect Lord.
NOTES:

Democracy, Modernity, and the Jewish Political Tradition,

Jewish

Political Studies Review, 5:1-2 (Spring, 1993).

3. A. Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1993), p. 330; H.V . Jaffa, Chastity as a Political Principle: Measure for Measure, Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds. J. Alvis and T.G. West (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000), pp. 211-12.

4. The most reliable and literal translation known to me is by M.

Flaumenhaft (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1981).

5. Cf. W. Shakespeare, Sonnets, Nos. 129 and 116. 6. L. Berns, Gratitude, Nature and Piety in King Lear, Interpretation, Vol. 3/1 (Autumn, 1972), Sections V and IX; Rational Animal-Political Animal: Nature and Convention in Human Speech and Politics, Essays in Honor of Jacob Klein (Annapolis: St. Johns College Press, 1976), pp. 29-35, esp. section III; [uncorrected version in The Review of Politics, Vol. 40, No. 2 (April, 1978), pp. 231-54.] 7. L. Berns, Transcendence and Equivocation: Some Political, Theological
and Philosophic Themes in Shakespeare,

Shakespeare as Political

Thinker, cited n. 3, pp. 402-4.

8. Chastity as a Political Principle: Measure for Measure, citation n. 3, p. 221. 9. The locus classicus for the relation between private and public, polity and family is Aeschyluss trilogy Oresteia. The trilogy begins with a world where family feeling, the spirit of revenge and cycles of blood feuding dominate and characterize political and social life. Agamemnon, the triumphant leader of the Trojan expedition, is killed on his return to Argos from Troy by his wife Clytaemestra for the sake of my childs Justice, that is , to avenge the death of their daughter sacriced to propitiate the gods holding up the expedition to Troy. The ruling deities are the Old Goddesses, the Daughters of Night, the ingrown, vengeful Furies. In the second play, Orestes, Agamemnons and Clytaemestras son, following the charge of Apollos oracle, avenges his fathers death by killing his mother. The Furies, the bloodhounds of my mothers hate, pursue him. The third play, The Eumenides, the well-meaning ones, celebrates the founding of the Court of the Areiopagus at Athens. Orestes seeks sanctuary at Delphi. The Pythian oracle is overwhelmed by the pursuing Furies. Apollo himself inter-

1. Cf. H.V. Jaffa, The Conditions of Freedom: Essays in Political Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp.
152-53; G. Anastaplo, St. Louis University Law Journal (Spring, 1965), 390.

2. G. Anastaplo, Censorship, The Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, 1986 printing, Volume 15, pp. 634-641; The Amendments to the Constitution: a Commentary, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 52-56: R.A. Licht, Respect is not a Right, Crisis, Vol. 11, No. 7, July-August, 1993, pp. 41-47; Communal

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venes and stills the Furies long enough for Hermes to guide Orestes to Athens for a nal resolution of his case. At Athens Pallas Athene takes charge. She who was not born of woman (born from the head of Zeus), a most man-like female, almost a mean between male and female, turns the trial over to an open court of Athenian citizens. The Furies argue against, Apollo argues for Orestes; gods as advocates, before human beings as judges and jury. The jury of twelve human beings is given the authority to decide. The sovereignty of hitherto untamable family feeling is brought under the supervening authority of the polis, the political community. Although they have the authority, the human beings by themselves are incapable of deciding between conicting rights of mother and father. The jury splits evenly. The deciding vote is given to the goddess Athene. Divine help is required for settling such questions. She decides for Orestes. It seems that reasonable procedures for settling and dispensing with problems may sometimes be more important than assurance that the solutions are correct. These questions are no longer to be dealt with violently behind closed doors but deliberately before public and open spectacles of law court, assembly and theater. The Furies are unwilling to accept these dispensations of the younger gods. By a combination of threats and persuasion Athene cajoles the Furies to integrate their authority over family feeling and the household into the service of the greater good of the political community. They shall win rst fruits in offerings for children and the marriage rite. The Furies nally agree and are transformed into Eumenides. The feelings they preside over which are capable of tearing the political community apart cannot be extinguished: they are to be redirected against the despotically minded consumed by a terrible love of high renown and external enemies; they will bolster the mutual love of fellow citizens. This is a cure for much that is wrong among mortals. Cf. M. Flaumenhaft, Seeing Justice Done: Aeschylus Oresteia, Interpretation, Vol. 17/1, (Fall, 1989), pp. 69-109, reprinted in The Civic Spectacle: Essays on Drama and Community, (Lanham: Rowman and Littleeld, 1994), Chapter 1; and David K. Nichols, Aeschylus Oresteia and the Origins of Political Life, Interpretation, Vol. 9/1, (August, 1980), pp. 83-91.

10. L. Berns, Gratitude, Nature and Piety in King Lear, citation n. 6, p.

50: ... love and passion ... need to be controlled by law and authority. Being conceived outside the order of law, Edmund was banished from the family circle. He is not altogether unnaturally devoid of family feeling.

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A Review of Eva Branns The Ways of Naysaying

Chaninah Maschler
The rst impetus for this study,1 Eva Brann tells us in her Preface, was the desire to deepen her understanding of the two capacities of our inwardness that had been the themes of two of her previous books, The World of the Imagination and What, Then, is Time? As the imagination ...makes present what is not before us by reason of nonexistence or withdrawal, so memory ...holds what is not with us by reason of having gone by....Therefore... to understand something of imagination, memory, and time, we must mount an inquiry into what it means to say that something is not what it claims to be or is not there or is nonexistent or is affected by Nonbeing. And that is what I am after in Ways of Naysaying (pp. xiif, my italics).2 Addressing, I presume, readers of the rst two volumes of her trilogy, Brann explains that and why there will be less reliance on introspection and more reliance on logic and language in the present volume: We could, it is thinkable, be aware of our internal images...without having language for them....But whether we could know about negationthat we are capable of it and how without speech is doubtful to me. Hence within my scheme, no, not, non- are deeper than imagination and time, in the sense that the former underlie the latter and are revealed in their analysis (p. xiii). Earlier in this paragraph, and in more detail later, when summarizing Freuds essay On denial in her Chapter One, she allows that there is a pre-linguistic nay-saying of instinct and gesture. Since this paragraph is rather condensed, and much hangs by it, let me try to say in my own words what I believe it to hold: Doing no, for instance, spitting out or pushing away or averting the gaze, occurs (ontogenetically and, according to Freud, also phylogenetically) before speech. And a sort of prereective reacting to heard
Eva Branns The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing. Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littleeld, 2001. Chaninah Maschler is tutor emeritus at St. Johns College.

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no, or even the uttering of the syllable no (as mere substitute for the gesture of rejection) may well be a phase of childrens intellectual history. Further, having images and reacting to them, or to having had them, can occur without the one who reacts being aware that what he or she is reacting to is an image. But to peg an image as an image, which means, to take it as a likeness of its original, that requires, according to Brann, the thought This is and is not that. Therefore there can be no sizing up of a mirror image, memory image, dream image, perceptual presentation as merely an image until after negation has entered upon the mental scene. Now knowing about negativity, which is different from prereectively reacting in a rejecting or separating manner, that could not occur sans speech. While images are, therefore, existentially prior to (earlier than) speech, in involving recognized negativity they show themselves conceptually posterior to speech.3 Brann seems to be employing some version of the Aristotelian contrast between rst to us and rst in nature. This is how I construe her claims that, while imagining and recollecting are more manifest, negativity lies deeper than do these capacities of our inwardness; and that, furthermore, whatever is condition for the possibility of negativity lies more deeply still. Her book as a whole will argue that the Platonic discovery that Being holds Nonbeing may well be the ultimate answer to the question was die Welt im Innersten zusammen halt (what it is that most intimately holds the world together, Goethe, Faust Pt. 1, li 383). The Introduction of Branns book is given over to etymology. It draws attention to the fact that in English, German, French, Latin, and Greek (the languages in which the Western philosophic tradition is expressed), most of the basic words for naysayingno, not,non-,nothing, and negativitystart with a nasal sound. Jesperson, and before him Darwin, remarked on this fact and entertained the thought that, conceivably, our signs for negation are transitional between naturally expressive gesture and conventionally learned word. The n-word would then

have originated as a substitute for the snort of aversion or refusal and in the course of linguistic and cultural history have proliferated into a multiplicity, the last but not least of which would be the abstract general negation word not we use for contradiction. In Chapter One, Brann, like many of us today, seems to share Darwins impulse to give direction to speculation about human archai by studying child development. Accordingly, the title of her books rst ofcial chapterChapter One, Aboriginal Naysaying: Willfull Norefers initially to the primordial no to everything of the toddler (p. 9), but eventually to other respondings (Goethes Mephistopheles serving, seriocomically, as paradigm) that reject, disobey, or spit out what is given. Thus some of the discussion of nihilism in Chapter Six looks as though it were continuous with Chapter Ones analysis of childish no. The toddler rejects the breast, the command or prohibition, the saying so it is of the grown-up; the nihilist turns down shared traditions, institutions, and even intersubjectively acknowledged matter of fact. I loved the affectionate and knowing description of the terrible twos in this chapter. I share Branns admiration for Freuds astonishingly potent brief essay on negation, which she summarizes, pretty much in Freuds own words, on pp. 10-12. But it looks to me as though Freuds quasi-Nietzschean genealogy of the intellectual function of judgment out of the interplay of biologically primary impulses has, when Brann is through with it, become tinted with Augustinian surmises of original sin. In evidence I cite the fact that it is rather late in the chapter (footnote 28, p. 22) that the healthy naysaying of resistance to temptation and of rebellion against tyranny are mentioned; also, that the emphasis on self-awareness emerging from deeds and words of arbitrary willfullness (cf. p. 18) does not seem to be balanced by reections on the childs need to exercise, so as to perfect, skill at matching expectation with outcome, and vice versa. What I have in mind is well-explained by Jerome Kagan. In brief, Kagan holds that much of what we

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observe in the not quite two-year-old is made intelligible if we view it as due to the emergence of three related competencies: ability to notice that some happening or action is at odds with what is right and regular; absorption by the idea of standards as standards, both those set by others and those set by oneself; awareness of ones own and the worlds ability or inability to meet standards. I am condent that Brann would agree that these competencies involve the childs increasingly better memory: Isnt much of the toddlers testing of the world, commandeering of adults, and rst Adam-like rage at the worlds or the grown-ups not coming through connected with practicing the ability to match outcome with forecast and plan, remembrance with presentation? It is my impression that Brann writes more nearly in this spirit in What, Then, is Time? (See p. 165). The chief questions asked and answered in Chapter Two, where the not of logic is taken up, are as follows: 1.What is negation? 2.Where is the sentence negated? 3.Is the positive prior to the negative? 4. How is negation related to falsity?7 Following Aristotle, Brann assigns negating (the act) and negation (the acts sentential consequence) to the genus of opposition. An admirable overview of types of opposition, as described and classied by Aristotle, is provided, while opposition in general is recognized to be indenable.8 Plainly, the idea of not is claried when, through insertion into its genus, it is made evident that not must be discriminated from fellow-contenders for naysaying primacy, for example, speaking linguistically, the particles non- or un- or a- and, speaking semantically (?), the polar relations of contrariety and privation. The not of contradiction is declared the winner, on Aristotles authority (p. 27). But, Brann hastens to add, contradiction, which is sheer, unintermediated opposition (studied as such under the heading of question 4), belongs to thinking and speaking, not to things. We seem, perhaps contrary to expectation, to have ferreted out something like an answer to the question of what negation consists in. A summing up of the interim upshot of the inquiry into the

nature of not is provided on p. 29f. and concludes with the sentence: Negation arises from the human desire and ability to make distinctions; it is (most likely) grounded in the oppositions and polarities that belong to beings.... Where in the declarative negative sentence is the particle that accomplishes negation located? is the second question. What motivates the question? One could imagine a linguist who is trying to learn an exotic language asking it. He would, I suppose, have tried to obtain a corpus of utterances sufciently rich to hold instances of all the elementary afrmative sentence patterns of that language (supposing this possible); next, hed have consulted with a native informant as to how one would, in his language, say the opposite(s) of these. Assume the native informant is a speaker of English and the linguists native tongue is some non-Indo-European language, say Chinese or Hebrew. If I understand Brann correctly, she believes that the Chinese linguist would somehow nd out that all the elementary afrmative sentence patterns of spoken English are reducible to the triadic pattern S is P . How could he have found this out? The best I can come up with is that, in learning English, he relies on the same logical truth on which he relied when he acquired his mother tonguethat whatever is said is interpretable as making some comment on a declared or otherwise manifest topic: The topic is named by one part of the sentence; the sentence attaches the comment to the name; and in so doing comments on, that is, predicates the sentences predicate of, the thing or things in the world that is or are the sentences topic.12 The question now becomes how and why this insight into the logically dyadic T-C structure of simple 13 afrmative sentences issues in the triadic S is P structure. The reason for my selecting a Chinese-speaking linguist was, of course, that (as Brann reports in the long and important footnote 22 on p. 64), Chinese sentences do not require a copula to accomplish the job of commenting. Hebrew doesnt either: Joseph holech merely juxtaposes what is, strictly speaking, a participial (thus adjectival) form of the verb to the proper name

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Joseph to say what in English would be said by the sentence Joseph is walking. But nothing stands in the way of a Hebrewspeaking linguists learning that in English sentences an is must be inserted between Joseph and walking for the predicating job to be accomplished. What all this fussing is about is the issue how logical and grammatical distinctions differ and mesh. Branns fourfold answer to the question where the negation particle is located in a sentence proceeds, not on the linguists basis of studying a corpus of English negative sentences, nor on the logicians basis of reecting on the negating jobs that would have to be accomplishable if the tasks of describing and reasoning rightly are to be carried out. Rather, she works with the S is P pattern of traditional logic and negates, rst the is or copula, next the P or predicate, third the sentence S is P as a whole, and nally, although not whole-heartedly, even the S or subject. Having done this, she points out the jobs done by the patterns which thus emerge.14 Why does she proceed in this manner? She is, usually, not at all friendly to mere algebraic patterning. More important, she knows that Frege, whose deep critique of the classical view [of negation] was taken up appreciatively in the concluding section of the treatment of question 1 (pp. 30-32), endorses something like what I tried to say through my fable of the Chinese or Hebrew-speaking linguist, that what chiey matters is the irreducible logical contrast between naming and predicating and their complementarity,15 whereas the presence or absence of some form of the verb to be is a linguistic accident. On rst reading I thought that her manner of proceeding in Chapter Two is due to her not being as convinced as was Frege of the need for a principled distinction between logic, as a normative science, and psychology and linguistics as empirical sciences which acknowledge logical norms in practice (as we all do when we think), but which do not study them.16 Brann reports and up to a point explains that Frege distinguishes T-C structures qua what he calls Gedanken (thoughts) from assertions (what Kant called judg-

ments). And she appreciates that thoughts, including negations, are for Frege objective and atemporal whereas he regards assertions as acts of a speaker or thinker who at some time or other asserts an assertable or its contradictry. She even quotes a sentence of Freges which brings this contrast to bear on the issue of negation.17 But she refuses to let go of inquiry into what it is in human beings and the world that leads to nay-saying.18 On second reading I found an outright answer to my question, why Brann distances herself not only from Frege but also from Plato and the Aristotle of On Interpretation, in footnote 22 (p. 64). She writes: I accept...[S is P] as the fundamental sentence form because people whose thought is congenial to me19 have built on it structures that are of great interest, and because I have corroborated by introspection that it is my most basic declarative mode of internal speech, closer to thinking than the bipartite sentence consisting of a subject and a predicative verb.20 Postponing till her penultimate chapter, Chapter Six, inquiry into what she calls the greatest question, namely, whether Something or Nothing is ultimate, the issue in section 3 of the present chapter is whether in human speaking denial is always derivative and in human speech negation is always secondary (p. 36). Boethius, ancient authors in the Aristotelian tradition, and modern cognitive science are reported to endorse the opinion that the afrmative is prior to the negative, as at rst blush it would seem to be, since any negating particle is an addendum. Bosanquet and Bradley are described as having answered the question in a more nuanced way: Negation is not as such a denial of afrmative judgment; it does not presuppose a particular afrmative judgment to be denied. But it does presuppose some general afrmation, namely, that of a world having a positive content judged to be real....The positive judgment itself cannot take place before the distinction between a mere idea and a fact of reality is recognized. And with this distinction the idea of negation is given (p. 40).21 Still, the over-all conclusion of the inquiry in section 3 is that negation is secondary.

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More minute examination of Bosanquets and Bradleys remarks on negation might have yielded a scheme for differentiating the diverse senses of the prior/posterior relation; causal priority might have become differentiated from conceptual priority; priority in dignity or rank from temporal priority.22 But as it stands, section 3 seems to favor a temporal sense of prior/posterior. This bothers me because I am inclined to believe that logicians qua logicians have no business asking about temporal priority and that conceptually the positive comes or rather is on the scene along with the negative. Thus neither is prior to either.23 As an illustration, consider the following: At the beginning of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle denes argument or deduction (syllogismos) as follows: A deduction is a discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so. I believe that anyone who grasps the type of necessity here spoken of grasps along with it the impossibility of the contradictory. Upon reection I recognize that I base this apparently psychological observation on the conceptual (i.e. logical) truth that must-bes are the contradictories of cannot bes and cannot be apart from them. Indeed, it dawns on me that my seemingly psychological claim may be nothing but the conceptual truth itelf in another form of words. The treatment of question 4 (how negation is related to falsity) shows a respect for Wittgenstein that was, I believe, absent from Branns previous writings.24 His Tractatus is praised both for asking and for answering the following questions: (1)How do Truth and Falsity come to be obverses (i.e. opposites)? (2)How is negation related to them and to truth-values? (3)Why are propositions bipolar? (4)Can we justify the logic textbooks assumption that each proposition has only one negative?(p. 47).25 The two paragraphs immediately preceding the enunciation of these questions seem to report the answers that Brann found in Wittgenstein. I quote them in full: It all begins with a discrimination exercised by us over a logical space wherein things are seated within their place in their proper relation congurations, a discrimination of the otherness of what

is false. So prototruth26 is in the world of fact. Now comes a proposition. In its negative and positive sense it is like a solid body that restricts all movement into a certain place; in its positive sense it has an empty place where the object can t in (Tractatus 4.463). These [comparisons ]are pictures of the ... inherent bipolarity of every proposition. It shows negation from the beginning related to the negated proposition, for it is that hole which the negating proposition is blocking (Tractatus 4.0641). So to understand a proposition is to see the logical space (Tractatus 3.4) and to discriminate what the facts would have to be like to make a proposition...[i.e. a logical picture] true or false. Truth, then, or falsity, is the consonance or correlation of a propositional picture with reality (Tractatus 2.21), where reality (Wirklichkeit) is the existence or non-existence of facts (Tractatus 2; 2.06)a non-existent fact being one that is pushed out of the world picture by the fact that exists. In this correspondence is truth in the primary sense, and it comes in the duality true-false because of the way logical space divides and we discriminate the facts. In the sense of propositions lies the polarity positive-negative, the latter of which is expressed in the sign not- when the facts fail to correspond to p. Truth values, T and F, are secondary to and derived from negation: The sense of a truth function of p is a function of the sense of p (Tractatus 5.2341). Thus T and F are not properties of propositions (Tractatus 6.111) any more than are positive and negative. The truth values of the truth tables capture the relations of T and F to p and not-p more than they dene the latter. Section 4 concludes with the following remarkable observations: (1)The examination of the Tractatus has revealed that for Wittgenstein and other moderns truth comes from the world, and negation is in propositions. For traditional philosophers it is just the other way around: Negation is in the world of appearances and in the beings of the intellect, and truth is in the propositions (p. 48). (2)What Aristotle says about the true and the false in Metaphysics Bk. IV , 1011b25 and Bk VI, 1027b19ff tends to show

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that Heidegger was quite right when, in his Logic, he denied that the Aristotelian texts hold a correspondence theory of truth (p. 48). (3)Aristotle speaks for a world very different from the one in which the propositional calculus of Russell and Wittgenstein is at home. For Aristotle negation (I mean negation in an objective form, contrariety interpreted as Nonbeing and its effects) is in the world and falsity (I mean the not always unintentional failure of speech to reveal being is in statements....Whether negation is in the world or in speech is one of the numerous but interrelated marks by which a classical world...is distinguished from a modern world. For a world that has negation built in responds to receptive thought since it reveals its own distinctions, while a solidly positive one demands constructive reason since oppositions need to be made (p. 49). As the just-reported grand conclusions of section 4 of Chapter 2 tend to conrm, negation became thematic for Brann by virtue of her interest in the psychological and ontological topics that were mentioned in the opening paragraph of this review; whereas logiciansfrom Aristotle through the Stoic logicians and Frege, Peirce, Russell, Quineattend to negation chiey because of how it affects what is and what is not a valid pattern of argument. Patterns of reasoning or deduction rather than patterns of judgment or of propositions may well be their primary concern.27 This difference between herself and the logicians might also explain the otherwise rather puzzling remark, on p. 25, that by and large the negations of logic28 take place in symbols and are found in books. They are not so much naysayings as naywritings. For the purposes of reasoning the idea of contradiction, that is, of an opposition which is not only exclusive but also exhaustive, is indispensable: Illiterate Athenians have no trouble grasping the sense of arguments by contraposition such as, If virtue were teachable, thered be teachers of virtue, yet there are none. Therefore, virtue is not teacheable. And I surmise that the pattern of Euclids reductios (which likewise involve the stark negativity of contradiction) was rst discovered as a debating gambit and passed on by teachers of rhetoric. I say this

partly because it seems to me that even Euclids Elements still retain a viva voce dialogic rhetorical mode. When we refer to a nonexistent object, what are we thinking of and what are we talking about? (p. 76). Chapter Three begins by pointing out that this is a distinctively modern question,29 different from the ancient one taken up in Platos Sophist, how nonbeing can be, to which Chapter Four will be devoted. Four types of non-existents are mentioned for purposes of illustrationmembers of extinct species [dodos, for instance]...deceased human beings [for example, Socrates]...artifacts no longer extant,30 but also all the entities that never did exist in the ordinary sensible sense, such as unicorns (p. 79). Roughly speaking, four types of answers are sketched in Chapter Three: Bertrand Russells theory of denite description, Alexius Meinongs theory of objects [and objectives], the recent version of Meinong worked out by Terence Parsons in his 1980 book Nonexistent Objects (New Haven: Yale University Press), and any one of a number of theories according to which pretense and make-believe are the chief explanatory principles,...[not of the behavior of nonexistent objects], but [of] how they manage to come on the scene to begin with, [and] what we cognitively do to cooperate in ction making (p. 99). From the way these theories are elaborated it becomes apparent that, although as the two earlier volumes of Branns trilogy arguedour ability to think and speak truly or falsely of bygone things is testimony to the powers of the human imagination, in that the feat of re-calling depends on or consists in the imaginations having succeeded at making temporally absent things present, it is the saving of ctional entities that chiey matters for the purposes of the present books Chapter Three. Before she turns to a fairly detailed examination of Russells treatment of proper names and denite descriptions, Brann lets us know that the theory that is the winner in the world of logic [namely, Russells], will turn out to be something of loser in the world of ction (p. 76). Russells theory, as she tells us Parson too

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observed, pays too high a price for its clarity: The theory commits us to treating the sentences of ction as false, while most of us think they have at least a sort of truth, and some of us even believe that they often have more truth than mere fact does (p. 86). Meinong, contrarywise, comes near to saving the phenomena of that intentional experience of central interest to this trilogy...the experience of imagining (p. 91). Russells excision of nonexistents from reality31 is false to the power that some non-existent beings and places have, moving us as models and attractors, and outliving us by millennia, and in a word impinging on us as if existence were home to them as well [as to ourselves?] (p. 102). Instead of recapitulating what Brann says about the technical aspects of Russells theory of description and Meinongian rival theories, I want to dwell a little on Branns question how we are to account for the fact that the Natasha, Pierre, and Andrey of Tolstoys War and Peace or the Hari Kumar and Ronald Merrick of Scotts Raj Quintet32 have become our companions. A familiar answer begins by reminding us of our unabating curiosity about our fellow human beings, whether met in the esh or encountered vicariously through what our friends, our children, our journalists report and our television news programs show. But the characters who people novels are immensely more memorable than the Tom or Dick or Harry that our neighbors tell us about. Well, that does somewhat depend on what a particular neighbor is capable of telling us about a particular Tom (or Jane for that matter), not to mention the particular Tom or Jane spoken about. But to the extent that it is true, may it not in large part be the result of novelistic characters (at least those that dwell in novels of substance) becoming so much better known to us than any persons not our real life intimates?33 Novelists are much better at noticing things than most of us are, and better at imparting what theyve noticed too. Also, our acquaintance with novelistic characters is a shared acquaintance, shared with other make-believe characters in the novel, with the novels author, and with fellow-readers of the novel. It is hardly news that sharing (comparing notes and impress-

sions) is immensely pleasurable, greatly contributes to a feeling of solidarity, and is constitutive of our sense of reality. Add to whats been said our relish for just about all human skills or powers, our own as readers and the novel-making skills of the author. Most important, count in the special joys of play and makebelieve: Arent we well launched on the beginnings of some sort of answer to the question Why and how do ctional characters become real to us? Brann does not think so. At least, she rejects the idea that what we relish, in ourselves and novelists, is the exercise of the human power of make-believe: Being absorbed into a ction, living in its landscapes and with its people, is not well described as a form of pretensenot on the readers or viewers part and so much less on the poets or painters part....Children, to be sure, play Lets pretend, but that is usually when the game requires that roles be assigned , and Id bet that the mover of the pretense doent often assign, say, the submissive role to herself; in participating in a novel, on the other hand, we may well surrender ourselves to the experiences of the underdog (p. 99f).34 I wonder whether childish dramatic play (as the child psychologists call it) and make-believe of every sort is here conceived of in all its richness. Think of the innite variety of solitary and collaborative pretending and letting be we catch our children at! Sure, sometimes there is one kid in charge (Ill be mommy and youll be baby) but by no means always. Two games of make-believe I remember watching were: spreading out newspapers on the oor to be islands and going island-nding, island-hopping, and islandworking; arranging marbles in rows and letting them be children at school. Neither of these games called for leadership. Older children would sometimes join the younger ones at play, humbly grateful and gratied to be allowed in on the game. Improvisational theatre has some of these qualities, I believe, though I cannot be sure since I have never participated, either as actor or as audience.35 I went on like this because I want to make concrete that there might be ways of taking ction seriously and trying to understand why and how

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make-believe matters that dont proceed by way of ontology but by way of psychology. The British pediatrician and child psychologist D.W . Winnicott may have something to teach us here.36 And as for grown-ups making believe, I have begun to read Kendall L. Waltons Mimesis as Make-Believe, On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Part Four of this book tries to show why it is all right to do without ctional entities. I should, however, also mention that in Austria, at the University of Graz, much is currently being written about the logic and ontology of ctional objects. A reader of an earlier version of this review advised me that I need to report where I stand on the issue of the being and non-being of ctional characters. I am undecided, because I have insufciently considered (to give just one example) whether my belief that one can be as mistaken in ones reading of a ctional character as one can in ones reading of a violin sonata does or does not have ontological implications. My laziness about ontology may have something to do with the fact that I lean toward believing that it is more illuminating to ask questions about how imagined persons and places are and are not like historical individuals and geographic regions, or how what one learns about good and evil from living hooks on to what one learns about them from literature, than it is to delve into ontology. The rest of Chapter Three is devoted to reections on lies and lying37 and to Anselms so-called ontological proof of the impossibility of Gods non-existence.38 The setting out of Anselms argument is very pretty! Chapter Four: When we begin to read Chapter Fours rst paragraph, we are already in possession of the guidepost furnished in the Preface (p. xiv): Here [in section 2] comes on the scene the Non of philosophy (my italics), a prex signifying not the brusquely rejecting denial of fact in words but the more forgiving opposition of two elements in the same world. The thought of Nonbeing comes among us as the unbidden effect of Parmenides injunction against it, and Plato will domesticate that same Nonbeing, bringing

it into philosophy as the relational principle of diversity, the Other. But to reach section 2 we must traverse section 1. It begins: Parmenides learned from the goddess who dwells in the house of truth that Being is and that he must not embark on the way of Nonbeing. As far as I know, Nonbeing had not established itself in anyones thoughtat least in the Westbefore Parmenides deity warned him off this path of inquiry; nor has it ever vacated its place in thought since. Her [i.e. the goddesss] repeated prohibitions and injunctions against this Unthinkable and Unsayable seem to have done for this philosophical offense what inveighings against sin have so often accomplished in the moral spherethey have launched it on its career as a well-formulated and ever attractive presence (p. 123). Among the titillating suggestions of Branns commentary on Parmenides poem there is this, that this heroic epic (in dactylic hexameter) is unmistakably [intended as?] a rival to Homers Odyssey, so that the ancient difference between philosophy and poetry of which the Republic speaks (607b)39 rst comes on the world scene when the journeying of young Parmenides displaces that of middle-aged Odysseus. I nd myself incapable of paraphrasing what Brann says about Parmenides. Here are some more quotations: We often use phrases like sing a song, where the object is the action of the verb made into a thing accomplished. Parmenides sometimes does something symmetrical with the verb to be at the front end of a sentence. He turns the verbal sense into a subject. But I dont think that Being or its negation is thereby established as a thing....On the contrary, mere verbal Is remains the truest kind of showing forth, and the nounlike forms merely display the inability, or rather unwillingness, of the goddesss speech to get outside the meaning of that little word which courses through human speech surrounded by subject and predicate. Parmenides poem is a rebuff before the fact to those who will claim that Indo-European languages are indefeasibly subject-and-predicate-ridden. For this is what Parmenides is bidden [by his goddess] to convey: the sheer Isness of which we always get hold

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when we think beyond multiplicity....The common declarative tripartite sentence...is an implicit expression of three distinctions: between the thinker and the thought (since some thinking person is having and uttering a thought); between the thought and what it is about (since the sentence states a thought-proposition about an object); and between the object and its properties (since the sentence predicates a property of its subject). At the very beginning, before these elements have ever been formally established, the goddess wants to prevent them from being distinguished....My main purpose in this section has been to enter just enough intothe meaning of Is to make sense of the Is not that trails it as its unwelcome but unshakable doppelganger (p. 130ff.). The next step in the ancient story of Nonbeing is...the reversal of its outlaw status and its integration into the community of Beings. It is taken in Athens, the city of reconciliations (p. 138). What follows the exquisite paragraph whose two opening sentences were just quoted40 is a fresh setting out of reections on Platos dialogue the Sophist.41 I describe a few of these. Seasoned readers of Platonic dialogues agree in noticing that the conversation in the Sophist begins with the question whether corresponding to the three names or titles sophist, statesman, philosopher there are three beings or three types of being. Given the fact that there is a dialogue called Sophist and also one called Statesman, the non-being of a dialogue called Philosopher is a glaring fact. Some Plato commentators have argued that the Philebus is the missing dialogue. But Brann believes that there are indications in the Sophist that Plato means us to understand that sophists and philosophers are identical, though differing in three respects: First, the dialectical skill which is shared by sophists and philosophers is, in the philosopher, accompanied by a kind of professional ethics. Dialectic is, for him, a sacred trust. For the sophist it is a moneymaking techne, for sale to the highest bidder. Second, unlike the traveling sophist, who is detached from civic loyalties, the philosopher never forgets his human circumstances (p. 139). Third, the

philosopher is that rare sophist who acknowledges Nonbeing without taking cover in it (p. 139). To catch the vulgar sophist, the philosopher-sophistin this dialogue represented by an unnamed stranger-guest from Parmenides city, Eleamust somehow show that contrary to what Parmenides goddess taught him, Nonbeing is. But it is not only to catch the sophist; nor just to defend the possibility of false speech, negative speech, and error. Rather, to save philosophy itself (to save speech itself?), Nonbeing must be allowed to be! (Sophist 260A). The stranger therefore, Theseus-like, or again, Athena-like, bestows citizenship on Nonbeing by declaring it a form among the koinonia of forms (p.141). It is the diversifying relational principle or form Otherness, not to medamoos on, absolute nothing. It is its ...[being identied] as the Other that saves it from the utter inabilitywhich Parmenides does indeed assertto become sayable....Nonbeing both bonds and negates among beings, but its negation is not annihilation (p. 142). The chapters last paragraph makes the transition to Hegel: In Nonbeing naysaying has found its enabling principle in the realm of Being. Now comes a view of speech and thought [namely, Hegels] as themselves having inherent negativity. As Nonbeing was a source of ontic diversity, so this [Hegelian] negativity will be the source of mental motion (p. 144, my italics). Concerning Chapter Five I merely report that it employs the trinity Spirit, Understanding, Reason to display and classify the kinds of negativity encountered in Hegels Phenomenology, Kants First Critique, and Hegels Logic. Devotees of Hegel will nd much to admire here. The chapter concludes with a paragraph announcing that, though the earlier chapter concerning Parmenides and Plato and the present one concerning Hegel conspire to reafrm that Being is prior to Nothing, this is not as yet fully established: Therefore Chapter Six42 jousts with the greatest questionwhich is ultimate, Something or Nothing? Most winning, witty, and sometimes even wise of all the sections of Ways of Naysaying are the concluding pages of this chap-

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ter, Chapter Six, about Nothing, offered under the seemingly bleak heading, Nothing as Inescapable End: Death (pp. 188-198)! However much of the time I was rather lost in this chapter. The reason, I imagine, is that Branns question, whether Something or Nothing is ultimate, never jelled into being a question for me. Yet as best I understand the chapter, the various items it gathers togethermodern nominalism (p. 170), Epicureanism and the void (p. 171ff), the blithe nihilism of some of the Buddhist schools (p. 173), the political nihilism of the mid-nineteenth century Russian revolutionaries portrayed in Turgenievs novel Fathers and Sons (p. 179), and Heideggers teachings concerning the nihilating nihil (das nichtende Nichts, p. 184ff) are thought to deserve to stand side by side because they all afrm, albeit in different ways, that Nothing is more C primordial, more really real, than Something. This is the sense in which they are all of them nihilisms.43 Another thing that they may have in common is an ontology in which will is prior to understanding. It is possible that my failure to understand the chapter and its leading question is due to incomprehension of Heidegger: I tend to become so overwhelmed with irritation at his preachy incantational tone, his haughtiness, his tricks of inverting grounds and their consequents, his abuse of the scholarly riches deposited in etymological dictionaries, that I become incapable of paying attention to what he says. Conclusion: (1)Is all human opposing (in will, word, or deed) reactive to, thus parasitic on, a posing? (2)Might negating responses constitute evidence for the being of Nonbeing, Nonexistents, or even of Nothing? (3)Supposing there are Nonexistents and Nonbeings, by what powers of the soul do we encounter them? In her nal chapter, Brann recapitulates the afrmative answers she earlier gave to questions (1) and (2). But she now expands on what was said about Nonbeing in her pivotal Chapter Four: Besides the nonexistents that respond to our sense of what is missing...there are also declines and falls from existence, right in the

world around us, that we experience as a sort of nonexistence. Take, for example, the reection of a willow tree that appears in a pond. Take the numerous things and people in the world without that are not what they appear to be....This last group, fallen existences [my italics], particularly raises the question whether it is our way of experience or the nature of things that provides the not or non here (p. 215). As the past participle fallen which I underlined just now goes to show, Brann is introducing a principle of hierarchy into the realm of being. Nonbeing as otherness is the universal relativity....But there is also ...a vertical Nonbeing....This Nonbeing...has in it something of absolute inferiority, of defective or decient Being (p. 216). Brann has brought us back to the central books of Platos Republic, I mean, books VI and VII, with their image of the sun, diagram of the unequally divided line, and story of the prisoners conned to life in a cave.44 It is in this context that she reafrms the answer to question (3) thats been with us since her books opening sentence: Its neither sensing nor thinking that give us access to nonbeings and nonexistents but imagination and memory.45 Obviously, then, this review cannot have done justice to the book it tried to summarize and (in some measure) appraise, since that book is one third of a three thirds whole. I hope, however, to have conveyed something of its extraordinary scope, writing style, intellectual daring and imagination.

NOTES:

1. The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing (

New York: Rowman & Littleeld, 2001)

2. Cf. What, Then, Is Time?, p. 165:...we are able to have and interpret
images, to live consciously in the phases of time, and to think and speak negatively. My guess is that these three capacities are really triune, three-in-one. They may be the root of our humanity, and perhaps the subject of another book.

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3. See also World of the Imagination, pp. 405 and 783, where Brann expresses her agreement with Freud and Wittgenstein that one can speak of what is not, but not depict it. 4. His self-identication, from Faust pt. 1, lines 1336-8, is quoted on p. 14: I am a part of the force that constantly wills evil and constantly effects good....I am the spirit that constantly denies. Omitted from the quotation, though surely Nietzscheans would hold that they are, if not the, an arche of nihilism, are the lines: und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entste-

sense and meaning...are happily not within the task of this book. In my estimation, Freges insistence on the need for a Sinn/Bedeutung contrast and late Russells attempt to dispense with it must be discussed by anyone who investigates thinking and speaking and their objects. Observe also that conversational exchange is given no role in the account. A quick way of making this manifest is that, throughout the book, saying no is classied or explained in terms of exercising the will, although it surely gures when answering what linguists indeed peg as yes/no questions.

ht/ Ist wert das es zugrunde geht;/Drum besser ware es dass nichts enstunde... (and rightly so, because everything that originates
deserves to perish. Wherefore it would have been better if nothing had originated.)

5. Branns use of the Freud essay is ltered through Rene Spitzs The First Year of Life and No and Yes. I have not read these books. Therefore I
cannot tell whether her complaint that Freuds speculations about what it was that rst prompted the human races invention of a symbol for negation fail to include reection on not as accomplishing denial of truth or untruth is also Spitzs. Psychoanalytic theory does not tell whence comes mature negation and possible truth telling; these may not have a naturalistic genesis is the concluding sentence of her account of Freud. What a non-naturalistic account of origins might consist in is not explained.

10. My hunch is that Anscombes remarks about internal and external negation in her Introduction to Wittgensteins Tractatus (see in Anscombe pp. 31, 34, 35, 46, 47, 51), and her question (p. 53) ...Is the property of being true or false, which belongs to the truth-functions, the very sam property as the property of being true or false that belongs to the propositions whose internal structure does not interest us? is what rst prompted Brann to make the question about the location of the negation particle thematic. 11. If we are both looking at the ocean and you say Majestic! my guess
that it is the ocean that is said to be majestic is pretty safe. Thats how I mean otherwise manifest.

6. The Second Year: The Emergence of Selfawareness (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1981).

7. This list slights her treatment of double negation, of the logical paradoxes that are generated when negation and self-reference are allowed to combine, of the stretching of the concept of number through the introduction of negative numbers and zero, and of Kants discovery or invention of directed quantities (vectors) in the pre-critical essay An Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Numbers into Philosophy. Since these topics are listed in the well-prepared index, I omit page references. 8. Cf. Metaphysics ix, 1048b1-10 9. The quoted sentence ends with the bracketed remark ...of which the rst,
the opposition of oppositions, is surely that of thinking itself to its object. This claim makes me uneasy, given the remark, on p. xiii of the Preface, that the mysteries and conuncrums of intentiondenotation and reference,

12. For the somewhat ampler statement of this Fregean type of analysis of simple sentences which is the source of my remarks, see pp.132f, Anscombe and Geach, Three Philosophers: Aristotle, Aquinas, Frege. Please observe that although English, which has pretty nearly dropped the use of case endings, tends to place the name of the topic early in the sentence,classical Greek and other languages that use case endings to express syntactic structure may, for rhetorical purposes, place it late in the sentence. Note also that nothing prevents a simple sentences having a complex topic, for instance the ordered triple {Athena, Athens, this olive tree}, which is, on one analysis, the topic of the sentence Athena gave Athens this olive tree. When the topic is so identied, the predicate is gaveto When the item that would, in Greek, be in the nominative case is singled out as the name of the sentences topic, the predicate would be gave Athens this olive tree. What chiey matters, from a Fregean logical point of view, is the contrast between proper names (e.g. Theaetetus) and concept words (e.g ies or sits) as in the sentences Theaetetus ies and Theaetetus sits. A person who is unaware that the word give is trivalent and the word y or sit is monovalent hasnt got the hang of the semantics of these concept words.

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Cf footnote 11 below. See further Anthony Kennys Penguin volume about Wittgenstein, pp. 121f.

question (p. 63) Is Being at the true center of every sentence even if it is obscured by a predicative verb?

13. How simple is to be understood in this context is, of course, much in

need of saying.

14. In the spirit of Kantian architectonic, these ways of negating a sentence are later (p. 95) brought to bear on lying, so as to yield a classicatory scheme for lies. 15. In the dream theory of Theaetetus 202 the mistake is to suppose that
sentences consist of nothing but names; earlier, at 190, it looks as though sentences are being spoken of as consisting of nothing but predicate words. For explicit correction of such homogenizing treatment of the constituents of sentences, see Sophist 262.

21. I note that theres a large dose of such idealist thinking in Freuds essay on negation: the performance of the function of judgement is not made possible until the creation of the symbol of negation has endowed thinking with a rst measure of freedom from the consequences of repression and, with it, from the compulsion of the pleasure principle. 22. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics Bk V, Ch.ll. 23. Peter Geachs essay The Law of Exclude Middle (p. 79, Logic

Matters, Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) contains a nice exposition of this thesis.

Geach, like Brann herself (e.g., p. 28), exploits Wittgensteins metaphor of logical space and the notion of boundary for this purpose. Note, by the way, that it would be a mistake to assimilate Wittgensteins logical space to Branns psychic space, as she describes it on the opening pages of her Preface. Studying Branns, Wittgensteins, and the cognitive scientist Gilles Fauconniers uses of metaphors of space would be a delicate but worthwhile undertaking.

16. Does doing logic/doing empirical science exhaust the genus investigation? Brann would certainly question this bipartition. 17. Perhaps the act of negating, which maintains a questionable existence as the polar opposite of [afrmative] judging, is a chimerical construction, formed by a fusing of the act of judging with the negation. (p. 128 of Geach and Blacks Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford: Blackwell, 1952). 18. In footnote 54, on p. 69, Brann calls on Anscombe to testify that, as Brann puts it, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, in rejecting inquiry into the way world, pictured fact, language, and thought are related and pretending that epistemology has nothing to do with the foundations of logic and the theory of meaning, made claims that are fantastically untrue (Anscombe, Introduction to Wittgensteins Tractatus, (London: Hutchinson University Library, p. 28). 19. For example, and especially, Kant and Hegel. 20. This sentence continues, after a colon, as follows:The briefest way to put the reason why is that thinking speech brings its objects to a standstill even as it goes about discerning them through their properties. The declarative is expresses at once that transxing done by thought and the expansion with which the object of thought responds. The just cited explication of Branns introspective report is tantamount to an afrmative answer to the

24. See, e.g., What, Then Is Time?, p. 112ff. In other sections of Ways of
Naysaying Wittgenstein continues to be treated as the or a bad guy: He would, as Brann reads him,want to prevent her and fellow philosophers from investigating whether there is some one truth behind [the] many appearances of, in this instance, negativity (p. xiv and note 11 on p. xvii). In the chapter on nihilism, Brann approvingly reports that Stanley Rosen has shown that Wittgenstein and his progeny are nihilists because they cannot distinguish speech from silence. After the brief quote from Rosen, she goes on to say: For [according to Wittgenstein] it makes no difference what we say. It makes no difference because if, as the later Wittgenstein says...speech becomes meaningful only in a context of gamelike rules and conventions and as a form of life, then we can never get beyond these and never receive a sensible answer when we query a conventional usage or conventionalism itself (p. 183).

25. I was helped by Anscombes version of this last question, which runs as
follows: What right do logicians have to dene not by telling us that not p is the proposition that is true when p is false and false when p is true? The phrase the so- and- so is, after all, legitimate only when there is a soand-so and there is only one such.

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26. Does this word (or its German equivalent), occur in Wittgensteins text? 27. It is a striking fact that only Aristotles treatment of immediate inference is taken up (footnote 7, p. 61) and syllogizing omitted. Note also that in Chapter Three, when dealing with Russells account of Denite Description, nothing is said about the need, in mathematical reasoning, for the principle of substitutivity of identicals or the principle of existential generalization. See Ausonio Marras Introduction to his anthology, Intentionaliy, Mind, and Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972) for some brief remarks about the latter two. When all is said and done, Brann does not seem to be really interested in formal logic. This is how I account for her not catching the slip in claiming that In symbolic logic we do not enter the propositions as we did in section 2, but take them as primitive, symbolized by p or q, etc. (p. 43; cf p. 212). She certainly knows that Freges treatment of quantication (analysis of the sense and use of such little words as all, some, one, which is needed for doing predicate calculus) is what is usually singled out as the true advance beyond premodern logic; Stoic logic, though pre-modern, had already dealt with the denitions of the logical constants of propositional logic and with its basic argument patterns. I look as though Im being a pedant about the history of logic. But thats really not what I care about. Rather, ever since the days that I heard the World War II German soldiers who were entering Amsterdam, Holland, sing Denn wir alle lieben nur ein Madelein, Annemarie I have wondered, Should I feel sorry for that girl, Annemarie, burdened with being loved by this whole troop of men? Or are there as many Annemaries as there are men in this troop, and each of the girls gets one of the singing men? For a ne essay on this topic, see Peter Geachs History of a Fallacy in Logic Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972).

claims that nominalism is one of the philosophical positions adopted by those for whom disillusionment is a warrant of truth and concludes with a remark about the fanatically honest. These are, says Brann, the folk who take pride in shivering in the metaphysical cold. The quoted passages soundwhat shall I call it? dismissive to me. I wish there had been something more nearly like an explanation of what the nominalism/realism issue is and why Brann favors the realists. Cf pp. 4-6 of W .T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel (New York: Dover, 1955)?

30. Artifacts no longer in use, like sliderules, or tools for living about which
we learn through literary remains but examplars of which have not been encountered by archaeologists? I try more nearly to specify the question because I am confused whether the general question of how we can speak or think truly or falsely of kinds that arebygones is being raised or rather the question how bygone individuals can be referred to? Cf Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations 79 about the many senses of Moses did not exist. See also G.E.M. Anscombe and P .T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973) pp. 135f about the importance of Freges reviving the scholastic contrast between singular and universal propositions. Traditional logic rides roughshod over the distinction. Geachs essay Perils of Pauline in Logic Matters is refreshingly lucid and unstuffy on the subject of names and descriptioons (and much else besides).

31. Cf. p. 100: What Russell says he means, atly and irremediably, and therefore he must be atly and irremediably wrong: It cannot be the case that what is said about and within ctions is falseunless one maintains that logically accurate speech has no correspondence with humanly normal speech. For we say both that it is true and that it is true to life that Natasha Rostov marries Pierre Bezuhov, and we want to keep on saying just that. 32. See the splendid appreciation of the Raj Quintet in Branns contribution
to the anthology Poets, Princes, and Private Citizens edited by Joseph M. Knippenberg and Peter Augustine Lawler (Lanham: Rowman and Littleeld, 1996).

28. I believe this means the not of contradiction. 29. I am not sure how modern is meant here: post-Occamist, that is postrealist (in the scholastic sense of that word)? I ask for clarication of the adjective because I am not certain what, exactly, the systemic import of the observation is. See footnote 23 on pp. 111ff. See also the remark about the inherent nihilism of an absolute nominalism in her commentary on Wallace Stevens poem The Snow Man and the continuation of this thought in her interpretation of The Course of a Particular, p. 170. FootnoteA 3 on p. 199

33. The special pleasure we take in our own children is not solely due to
their being ours; it has much to do with our knowing them better than most other peoples children.

34. I worry a little about the rhetorical effects of using the words pretend
and pretense in lieu of make believe. But let that pass.

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35. The novelist Jorge Luis Borges writes somewhere, [The actor] on stage
plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person. I acknowledge, however, that novels differ from stage plays, involve (in addition to the things mentioned) some special a deux intimacy between the reader and the book.

detail how man became man (chapters 2, 3, 4) hold a plethora of negation words, whereas the opening chapter lacks all negativity.

43. If there is an explicitly stated denition of the word nihilism in

Chapter Six, I need to have it pointed out to me.

36. See for example Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock Publications,
1971 and perhaps also some of the essays about Winnicottt included in the collection edited by Grolnick and Barkin, Between Reality and Fantasy (New York: Jason Arons, 1978). I particularly recommend Rosemary Dinnages A Bit of Light.

44. Cf. Eva Brann, The Music of the Republic, St. Johns Review, volume xxxix, numbers 1 and 2. Se especially pp. 75,6.

45. Cf. the discussion of opinion on pp. 38ff of The Music of the Republic.

37. As best I recall, Brann does not, when treating of the lie in the soul (p.
94), worry about what Freud called repression.

38. I was puzzled that Brann did not reserve space in her book to discuss the
important topic of childrens and grown-ups often being uncertain whether this or that really happened and whether this or that named individual (Satan, Cerberus) or species of entities (witches) really exists or not. Helping children sort out the dreamt from whats in the public world of the awake is among our parental responsibilities. Thus ...does not exist seems to me to hold as important a story as is that about the being of non-beings.

39. Cf Epinomis 990 on that mere farmers almanac, Hesiods Works and

Days?. Parmenides reputedly was the rst to propose that the moon shines
by the suns reected light and that the earth is a sphere; also, that the evening and morning stars are one and the same. I therefore keep hoping for a reading of his poem that will show that its episteme/doxa contrast has astronomical meaning. But no such reading is endorsed by Brann.

40. These sentences allude, of course, to Aeschylus Oresteia and Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus. This well illustrates the dramatizing vividness of Branns ontological discourse. 41. Cf The World of the Imagination p. 389ff. and Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (English version,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), p. 82 and A Commentary on Platos Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 114f.

42. Corresponding to the afternoon of the day on which Man was created,
male and female, in Gods image? Yes, of course I am joking in playing with the numbers. But I am not just joking: The chapters in Genesis that tell in

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The Potent Nonentity: A review of Eva Branns What, Then, is Time?

Torrance Kirby
Time, Augustine claims, is so ordinary as to be impossibly difcult (Conf. XI.14). This is the paradoxical theme to which Eva Brann returns often (one is tempted to say time and again) in her remarkable, recently published volume What, Then, is Time? Time, the potent nonentity, proves to be as elusive a quarry as the Sophist himself. The inquiry begins with a high sense of wonder peculiarly tting in this of all philosophical quests. The inner experience of time and its foundation or ultimate ground, constitute the heart of this investigation. Brann employs an extended, highly elaborated aporetic approach to the search for a denition. So numerous and complex are the poriai encountered that this Protean beast is not pinned down with a denition until well into the closing chapter of the book. The investigation as a whole is composed in the form of a diptych with one larger panel devoted to the study of various selected texts or presentations by philosophers who, in Branns estimation, have written most deeply and most engagingly about time. A second smaller panel contains the authors own reections on the matter. She is careful to point out, study and thought, though not of necessity incompatible, are by no means the same (159). This book is worthy of the most careful reading with both ends in view. The predominance of the prolegomena in this investigation is consistent with the spirit of much contemporary, postmodern inquiry. Branns approach is underscored by the splendidly postrevolutionary claim that her purpose is not to change the world but to interpret it! Viewed in another light, however, the methodology of this book is resonant with the very best ancient authors,
Eva Brann. What, Then, is Time? Lanham, MD. Rowman and Littleeld, 1999. Torrance Kirby is an assistant professor at McGill University.

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and its hermeneutical approach reminiscent of Aristotelian science. The rst part of the book, a study of earlier philosophical presentations of time, constitutes a history such as one nds at the outset of many of Aristotles treatises. Branns study of the attempts of her predecessors to dene time is thus by no means any ordinary history. Her extensive review of the preeminent contributions to the hermeneutics of time claries wonderfully the question concerning time and enables the reader to make the great ascent from mere study to thought. In the reections of the second part, Brann proceeds intrepidly to face the question what, then, is time? head on. Discussion of the lisping efforts of predecessors (Metaph. A.1) in this chase turns out to be a daunting task. The relevant texts range from the hard to the hellishly hard, as Brann puts it. As in an Aristotelian history, the texts are selected with a view to clarication of certain key facets of the problem of denition. Four crucial theories about the nature of time are addressed through the study of four pairs of philosophers. The originality of Branns approach is striking. The unexpected pairings - Plato and Einstein, Aristotle and Kant, Plotinus and Heidegger, Augustine and Husserl - prove to be both inspired and illuminating. An important element of Branns purpose in this approach is to demonstrate that the larger questions about the nature of time are themselves by no means time-bound. By pairing the authors in this way Brann ensures that the problem of denition predominates over less important considerations. The rst approach to the theory of time, as exemplied by the arguments of Platos Timaeus and Einsteins Special Theory of Relativity, proposes that time is external, namely that time refers to external motions of which it is the measure, as in the case of a clocks measurement of the diurnal rotation of the sun. (The consideration of time as the externality of history and its movements is mercifully ruled outside of the present inquiry.) In the cosmos of Timaeus, time is the very intelligibility or numbering of the external motion of the visible heaven. As Brann puts it, this identication of time with phenomenal motion continues to bedevil the dis-

course of physics. Einstein displays little interest in the essential nature of time, but is absorbed rather by the question of quantifying time owing to complications arising from the implication of temporality in locomotion. After the fashion of the hunt for the wily Sophist in the Platonic dialogue of that name, the consequence of this initial presentation of a denition of time is to introduce a dichotomous division - namely between time in the world and time in the soul - which is of considerable use to Brann in advancing her own quest for an acceptable formulation. The boundaries have been narrowed considerably by the exclusion of merely external time as a fallacy. Before proceeding to the presentations of internal time, Brann examines a pair who propose highly speculative accounts of the generation of time out of space. Hegels dialectical exposition of the genesis of time out of space is put forward by Brann as possibly the most profound of all treatments of external time. For Hegel, time from its rst genesis as a pure Becoming, behaves like incipient spirit (Geist): Time is the Concept itself that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition. For this reason Spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time just as long as it has not grasped its pure Concept, that is, has not annulled Time (Phenomenology 801). Through a discussion of Bergsons mission to suppress extensive space in favour of intensive time Brann effects a transition to the second principal stem, viz. internal time or time in the soul, which is the general focus of the remaining three pairs of texts in the series of presentations. With her examination of the theories of Aristotle and Kant, Brann arrives at the second crucial stem of the dichotomous division of time into the categories external and internal. Although for Aristotle motion is properly the substrate of time, while conversely for Kant time is itself the ground of motion, both philosophers are driven to relate the notion of time to a psychic counting. As Aristotle says, time is the number of motion where motion is understood as disclosing continuous magnitude. The truth of time resides in the numbering or counting soul that meas-

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ures the before and after of this magnitude. Time, according to this presentation, is no longer viewed as an independent, substantive reality or but is rather reduced to the status of an accident or predicate which exists for thought. For Brann, Kants treatment of time displays a deep afnity with Aristotles on this more general level. The internal sense of time, however, represents much more in the Kantian metaphysics than ever dreamed of by Aristotle. For Kant this psychic counting is perhaps the most intimate characteristic of humanity. Indeed Brann shows that Kants treatment of time is most accessible when the Critique of Pure Reason is viewed as a new founding of human nature whose centre is time (55). Appearances may be removed from time but not the reverse, which reveals that time, for Kant, is prior in the order of knowing; the apprehension of change is understood to depend upon the a priori intuition of time. In one of numerous penetrating aperus scattered throughout the discussion, Brann draws attention to Kants nonetheless restricted view of our ability to know ourselves as temporal beings by reminding us of his low opinion of music. This, in turn, is contrasted with Leibnizs opposing exaltation of the unconscious counting of the soul in music as a pleasure given to us by God so that we may know of him; in music soul is revealed to itself and God to it (Principles of Nature and Grace 14). In the subsequent paired presentations of Plotinus and Heidegger, the inquiry proceeds to consider the ground of temporalitythat is, of some higher, possibly transcendent source of this inner sense of time. Thus the dichotomous division of the hunt advances to a new level of precision. For both Plotinus and Heidegger, as Brann shows, time constitutes the deepest condition for humanity. Plotinus identies time with specically human being in its manifestations of a peculiarly ecstatic nature, by the humans attempt to escape the element of its temporal fallenness. The Souls very appetite for things to come (Enneads III. 7.4, 34) keeps her in her fallen state. Temporal being strives for salvation, viz. the overcoming of temporal dispersion, through union with the eternal hypostasis above. Happiness, understood as

the ight of the alone to the Alone, is thus altogether outside time, for it is no mere mood or emotion, but rather a fundamental possibility for the soul, that of an undispersed present even beyond being (Enneads I. 5.7, 15). Time is made explicable through eternity, its original ground. Although radically distinct from Plotinus with respect to virtually the entire substantive content of his thought, Martin Heidegger at least shares with Plotinus the supposition that temporality is the key to understanding human existence. As a being whose essence is its existence, this ultimate ground is for Heidegger not the transcendent eternity of the Plotinian Primal Hypostasis, but rather the temporality of human being itself, Dasein. The discussion stemming from this remarkable dialectical pairing of Heidegger and Plotinus is particularly illuminating. In chapter four Brann arrives at her nal pairing of Augustine and Husserl with the observation that no two philosophers are both further apart and closer together. Through an examination of their discourse on time as a temporal stretching of the soul (distensio, as Augustine puts it), the argumentfor it is indeed an argument acquires a distinctly sharper dialectical edge. The coincidence of identity and difference in their thinking about time is uncannily appropriate to their strongly dialectical approaches to the quest to dene time. According to Brann, while Augustine sifts through the phenomena in search of existence and while Husserl neutralizes existence in order to nd the phenomena, both look within themselves for the phases of time, that is to say, for past, present, and future. For both philosophers, Brann argues, the problem of internal time is not to be referred to a higher ontological ground for resolution, as is the case with Plotinus, for example, but rather time is to be understood as arising out of and discerned within the soul or consciousness. Branns argument on this point is open to some dispute, at least with reference to Augustine if not to Husserl. Perhaps the device of pairing the presentations has led to a downplaying of Augustines afnity with Plotinus. It is common among contemporary existential readings of Augustine to de-emphasise his dependence upon Neoplatonic metaphysics. He begins his presen-

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tation on time with the in principio of Genesis 1, the revelation of the divine creative activity understood as totally beyond the temporal, narrative realm of human existence. In making his transition in Confessions from Book X on memory to Book XI on time, Augustine shifts gears as it were from looking within at the phenomena of consciousness to looking above at the higher ground of the life of the soul, ab interiora ad superiora. The Creator, who is altogether above the ux of becoming, is understood nevertheless by Augustine to be present, knowing, and active within the temporal realm. While temporal human existence, dispersed or distended as it is through phases of past, present, and future, is to be contrasted absolutely with the undivided existence of the One, Augustine nds nonetheless within the soul as imago dei a positive image of the activity of God in creation. The enigma of the human experience of time is thus referred by Augustine to the exemplar of the Trinity for resolution. In the psychological image of the Trinity memoria, intellectus, et voluntasAugustine nds a model for his reection upon the experience of time as at once continuous and without extension. He points to the chanting of a psalm as a potent revelation concerning time. He reects upon the recitation of a song that he knows, Ambroses hymn Deus Creator Omnium. The song is stored in memory, an already completed whole which the soul intends to sing. Before singing, the souls expectation possesses the complete song. As the soul sings, the relation of expectation to memory shifts syllable by syllable until the entirety of expectation has nally become a memory of the song as completed, as having been sung. Memory, presence, and expectation are united in the song. Through the singing of praise, itself a mode of confession, Augustine begins to see how the timeless and the temporal become one. Through song the soul is enabled to think the divine object in the image, and this, Plotinus certainly would regard as the most extreme absurdity. Thus, by collecting ourselves, we can escape from our temporal constitution into Gods standing Now, as Brann puts it, into eternity.

Brann concludes the part devoted to presentations of time with an extensive and complex analysis of Edmund Husserls phenomenological treatment of internal time-consciousness. The text of Husserls Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewutseins we owe, Brann tells us, to Edith Steins supererogatory editing of various manuscripts and notations. By way of a background sketch, Brann offers a helpful introduction to Phenomenology itself and looks at the inuence of Augustine, William James, and Franz Brentano on Husserls reections upon time. Husserl is particularly engaged with the problem of integrating the phases of time. Brann claims that he in fact solves the problem of relating the present, the moment of primary perception to its immediate retentional past and protentional future by giving a model for the orderly sinking away of perceptions and their intertwining with present consciousness (160). With Husserl, the presentations have in a certain sense come around full circle. Husserl brings his account of time to completion by reconstituting external time in the form of an absolute temporal ux which transcends the temporal phenomena of internal time-consciousness and which is, moreover, the underlying principle which sustains human subjectivity. As Brann concludes, Husserls ultimate temporal ux is a very nearly inarticulable nal fact (156). In the Second Part of the book, titled Reections, Brann purports to nally face the question What, then, is time? (The claim that the Presentations are a mere exercise in study and that only now, in the nal pages is she going to roll up her sleeves and get down to the serious business of thought seems not entirely ingenuous. Already a good deal of hard thinking has gone into both the pairing itself and the ordering of the pairs, all of which serves to advance the quest for a denition.) The reections proceed with a consideration of certain formal similarities between time and the faculty of imagination - here, once again, is the Sophist and the wedding of Being and Nonbeing. Brann shows that images present a relatively constant picture, viz. Being and Nonbeing in fusion, while time, on the other hand, is a ux of

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Being as passing over into Nothing and Nothing as passing over into Being (Hegel, Phil. of Nature 259). Time and imagination are thus connected with one another through the way Being is related to Nonbeing in both temporal process of becoming and in images. As might well be expected, Brann offers a fascinating comparison of these concepts by building upon her previous exploration of the faculty of imagination.2 There follows Branns own interpretation of the phases of time together with their appropriate faculties: past and memory, future and expectation, present and perception. Throughout, she draws upon the foregoing presentations of time by the philosophers which provide both the categories and a vocabulary which enable Brann to penetrate the question deeply and swiftly. This section of the book is a wonderful demonstration of the dictum of Bernard of Chartres who claimed to be able to see things far off by virtue of standing on the shoulders of giants. In an interesting and frequently amusing section Brann proceeds to analyse various time pathologies as forms of phase-xation. Here we have an opportunity to reect on aspects of times brutal tyranny, e.g. the contemporary idolatry of novelty, a xation on the just now, the trivialising of the past in nostalgia or the future obsession of the IT phenomenon. Brann even reviews cures for these time-induced pathologies such as that offered by Nietzsche in his teaching on the Eternal Recurrence of the Identical. Brann counters this frantic cycle of reincarnation with another, much more attractive option, namely the concept of Aevum, as manifest in the sempiternity of the angels in heaven or, alternatively, in the ctional temporality of the novel. All of this is delightful. Brann recommends the cultivation of aeveternity as at least a partial relief for our temporal ills. In the last chapter of the book Brann moves closer to the nal struggle with the denition of time by way of a via negativa. Here time is nally unveiled as the potent, indeed tyrannical, non-entity. The revealing is apophatic. Time is not external motion, nor is it an abstraction from process. It is not a power or force, nor a fungible substance (i.e. time is not even money!). Time is certainly not a

mere linguistic usage. As Brann succinctly puts this point, Language can guide thought but it cannot constrain it. (Brann notes in passing how neatly the distinctions of philosophical inquiry concerning time seem to turn up in the problems of linguistics.) Time is not Dasein. Whereas Heidegger regards human nitude as ultimately expressed in the fact our mortality, that our existence is destined to end, Brann counters optimistically that human nitude is better sought in the fact that we begin, we do not temporalize ourselves; we are born temporal. Time is no determinate being; it is not perceived by the senses, it is without external effects, and elusive to insight. Time is therefore a non-entity. Though apparently nothing, times not-being is nonetheless very powerful (although, be it noted, not a power). What, then, is time? Here the argument nally shifts from marked apophasis to a more kataphatic note. The afrmative denition comes in nine-fold form (a touch which no doubt would have pleased Pythagoras). It is not this reviewers intent, however, to spill the beans. In order to reap the full benet of Branns nal, dramatic unmasking of Timeto be altogether present as it were at the capture of this elusive beast readers are well advised to follow the leader of the hunt herself along the trail through all its intricate twists and turns. And who indeed are the intended participants in this quest? Brann recommends her book to anyone who longs to learn about time by pursuing the quest described above, to acionados, to students who seek to come to grips with some of the primary texts on time, and nally to teachers who might be on the look-out for some tips on selections for a syllabus on the interpretation of time. This is an unusually difcult book whose author challenges the reader to take note and whose rewards are proportionate to the investment of careful, punctuated attention.

NOTE:

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1. See Eva Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991).

The Feasting of Socrates

Eva Brann
Before reviewing Peter Kalkavages Focus Press translation of the Timaeus for the St. Johns community, I must, in all fairness, confess my partiality. He, Eric Salem, and myself were the cotranslators of Platos Phaedo and his Sophist for the same publisher. Together, over several years, we worked out some principles of translation which are discernible in this Timaeus version. In fact, I think the three of us would welcome with some glee the notion of a St. Johns school of translation. For we wanted to be working very much with the spirit of the Program and a possible use by our students in mind. We thought that translations of Plato should render word for word, even particle for particle, with the greatest exactitude, what the Greek said, avoiding all interpretative paraphrase, craven omissions, and latter-day terminology. But we also stipulated that they should catch the idiomatic expressiveness and the changing moods of the original. These principles are clearly at work in this rendering of the Timaeus. We learned as well, however, that each dialogue is a unique universe of discourse, the artful representation of an inquiry with its own approaches, terms, settings, and above all its own participants, each of whom is in a mood specic to this never-to-be-repeated, yet ever-to-be-continued conversation. Thus it follows that the Timaeus made its own particular demands on the translator. It is, after all, less a dialogue than a short tale of antiquity by Critias followed by an account of the cosmos by Timaeusa long one. The familiar voice of Socrates falls almost silent as these speeches are made to be a feast for his enjoymentor, perhaps, amusement. Timaeuss cosmology is full of the sort of technical matter Socrates does not scruple to spoof in the Republicthe very dialogue which establishes the sort of ideal city that his companions agree to bring to moving life for him by giving it its historical and cosmological setting.
Peter Kalkavage, Platos Timaeus. Newburyport, MA: The Focus Philosophical Library (2001).

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Timaean cosmology involves not only the moving spheres and circles that bear the astronomical bodies and the geometric elements from which they are constituted, but also the musical harmonies (scales) that ensoul the heavens. Three beautifully clear appendices provide the readerand this edition is meant for the adventuresome beginnerwith the fairly elementary knowledge needed to enjoy this heavenly entertainment. It should be said, though, that the cosmological astronomy of the Timaeus together with its sober mathematical exposition in Ptolemys Almagest was the serious science that stood behind the New Astronomy of the dawn of modernity. (There is a storyI cannot vouch for its truththat in the early days of the St. Johns Program books of astronomy and physics were to be found in the library ranged under Music, courtesy of the Timaeus.) The dialogue is so full of Greek science that there is a danger of regarding it as a source of antiquarian problems. But, the translator observes in his Preface, that is the very danger, the one of reducing the cosmos to a collection of mummied facts and recondite puzzles, to which the Egyptian priests are said to fall prey. So less is more by way of learned exegesis, and the well-illustrated appendices give just enough to make the dialogue intelligible to an amateur. Since Ive started at the back, let me say that here too you will nd an English to Greek glossary. The entries tell not only how a Greek word is translated and, if more than one translation has to be used, why that is necessary, it also gives the root or central meaning and others that ow from it. In sum, the entries are a pretty interesting lesson in philosophic Greek. To go to the front end of the book, there is, besides the Preface, the Introductory Essay. The Timaeus, the only Platonic dialogue known in medieval times and in all epochs the most inuential one among those philosophers to whom the constitution of the cosmos was of central interest, is also, in Peter Kalkavages words, the strangest of Platos dialogues. It is so strange that one wonders whether anything can be taken seriously . . . . [It] is strange not only to us but also in itself. The Introduction is intended to illuminate

that strangeness without dispelling it. The odd but necessary question is pursued: What is the Timaeus about? Socrates is all dressed up (kekosmenos) and in a strange mood. He gives a truncated, philosophy-free version of his Republic and asks to be told about this stripped-down political blueprint mobilized to go to war. The resulting verbal feast prepared for him among the three eminent men who are present (one mysterious fourth is absent) has an oddly skewed relation to the truth and the love of wisdom that are Socrates normal preoccupation, for it is presented as a likely story, and a story of likenesses, the way of being that is so dubious for Socrates. The festivity begins with Critiass retelling of an antiquarian tale about archaic Athens as told by the Egyptian priests to the visiting lawgiver of Athens, Solon. We hear that this old Athens, ancient even to the ancients, once defeated a huge and sinister island empire called Atlantis.* Critias thus presents a pseudo-historical Athens as the embodiment of a pale image of the Republic. There is plenty to puzzle about in this beginning. For this city Timaeus supplies the cosmic setting; we are invited to wonder how tting it is. A divine craftsman appears out of nowhere and makes the cosmos, the well-ordered beautiful world, in the image of an original model. Hence the cosmos has two wonderful features. It is a copy and thus, while imperfect in its being, capable of being in turn a model, as it indeed is in the dialogue. And second, it is intelligible, interpretable, not only as an intentionally made work of art, but as en-, or rather, circum-souled. For whereas the human animal has its soul within, the cosmos is encompassed by bands of soul matter. All these wonderful and signicant doings can be read in the dialogue, but the Introduction brings out their thought-provoking strangeness and their relevance to our humanity. Thus after the cosmic construction there is a harsher Second Founding. It has an elusive wandering cause, the source of power as opposed to goodnessan intra-cosmic, semi-intractable cause called necessity acting in a scarcely intelligible theater of

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operation, space. Within it arise body and the human animal: The making of man for Timaeus is a pious desecration, says the Introduction. It is delegated by the Craftsman-father to his starsons. This part of the Timaeus, the coming-to-be of organic life within the cosmos, is so weird that our undergraduates arent even asked to read it, yet Peter Kalkavage shows how to begin to make humanly applicable sense of it. Finally he returns to the question: Why is the greatest philosophical work on the cosmos framed by politics? An answer is suggested: The frame signals Platos reection on what happens when the Socratic search for truth is replaced by a Timaean will to order. But this shift to the constructive will might well stand for the revolution that initiated our modernity. The means to this new age are also adumbrated in this miraculous dialogue; in his nal assessment of the Timaeus Peter Kalkavage says that the likely story presents the paradigm of what it would mean to use mathematical structures to make ux intelligibleat least as intelligible as possible. Twenty-one centuries later the calculus will perfect these structures, and so the science by which we live and which Plato has pregured will really take off. Read this introduction to get a sense of what it means for a work to be great, to see deep into things and far into time. But better yet, read the splendid translation framed by the valuable apparatus. It is trustworthy; it sticks close to the text, word for word. But it is also readablenot translaterese but good, lively, and exibly intoned English, since faithfulness in translation includes preserving something of the literary quality of the original. This dialogue in particular is, for all the wild exuberance of its philosophical imagination, written in fresh, plain Greek, though plain terms are often put to novel uses.Would you expect to nd Being, Becoming, Same, Other, ordinary words with a gloss of high philosophy, in a cosmological context? Perhaps the best example is the divine Craftsman. As the translator points out in the glossary, the Greek word, which has passed into English as demiurge, merely

means a skilled worker available for orders from the public, so it was just right to preserve that sense with the plain English word. To help with background knowledge, there are lots of footnotes right on the page. Heres my recommendation, then: We have all these wonderful alumni seminars around the country. Why not devote one here and there to a reading of the Timaeus?And perhaps some participants might take advantage of Peter Kalkavages translation (which is, incidentally, purposely inexpensive). Id love to come and help, and so, I imagine, would he.

*I cant resist a footnote. In our own last century, there have been droves of people, many of them now active, who have fallen into Platos antiquarian trap and gone in search of this lost continent. The description of the island, which enormous geometrically planned public works have transformed into something formidably awful, is set out in the dialogue Critias. Its Speer-like architecture (Speer was Hitlers architect) appealed to the Nazis, whose mythmakers represented Atlantis as an early Nordic utopia, to be rediscovered by state-sponsored archaeologists. These people had at least got it right with respect to the scariness of the drawn-and-quartered, brass-walled locale. Most modern representations, be they in books, songs, or movies (of which Disneys Atlantis is the latest) are governed by the mistaken notion that Atlantis was meant to be a lost place of marvels and beauties, a sort of mid-ocean Shangri-la. Its actually a totalitarian topography, the triumph of the will over nature.